Framing matters: Inequality edition – by Joachim Klement – Beragampengetahuan

Most of us know that how you look at a problem influences how you assess it and what solutions you prefer. This framing effect can easily be shown by asking people to assess the health benefits of, say, a cup of yoghurt that has the label “99% fat-free” and compare it to a yoghurt with the label “1% fat”. On average, people will think of the 99% fat-free yoghurt as healthier than the 1% fat yoghurt, though both labels describe the same kind of yoghurt.

This framing effect is also in action when it comes to more important societal developments like our attitudes toward rising inequality as a study in Nature has demonstrated neatly.

For example, in one experiment, 32,000 people from 34 countries were asked to rate whether they attributed poverty in their country to situational causes (general unfairness in society) or behavioural causes (poor people are lazy or lack the discipline and willpower to do something about their poverty). Then they asked the participants if income differences in their countries should be larger or smaller.

The result across countries is shown in the chart below. Countries where the population thinks poverty is mostly driven by behavioural effects are far more accepting of income inequality than countries where the population thinks that poverty is mostly driven by situational effects and less by individual behaviours. Note the relatively extreme status of the United States where poor people are much more commonly derided as “welfare queens”, “lazy”, and “unwilling to work” than in European countries. The result is that inequality is much more acceptable to Americans than to Europeans.  

Attitude towards inequality and poverty

Source: Piff et al. (2020)

This difference in attitude toward poverty and inequality is an increasingly important dividing line between Europeans and Americans when it comes to attitudes about policies and society. In essence, the American attitude toward inequality and poverty is driven largely by the ‘American Dream’ where one can go from rags to riches through hard labour and a little bit of luck (but mostly hard labour). The result of this attitude is a society that is much more driven by individualism, and at the same time more dynamic and entrepreneurial.

In Europe, meanwhile, we have thousands of years of experience with societies that have collapsed into civil war or war because they became too unequal (For a list of some historical highlights I recommend the wonderful but now defunct podcast “Revolutions”). In a sense, we value stability more than individualism and as a result, are more opposed to inequality as a destabilising factor in society. The result is a tighter social fabric and better social safety net to catch the losers in society but the price we pay is less economic dynamism.

I am not passing judgment on one model of society being better than another, but I want to emphasise that one can make Americans more opposed to inequality by confronting them with individual examples of poverty. If you know somebody who has fallen on hard times or if you have fallen on hard times yourself, your attitudes toward inequality change drastically. And I can assure you from my own experience that this is true.