Perceptions of Scarcity & Responsibility inform Budget Negotiations

24Mar/11

Perceptions of Scarcity & Responsibility inform Budget Negotiations

I was recently asked about the psychology of scarcity and it gave me an excuse to revisit an old paper by Skitka and Tetlock (1992, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology) that contains a more complex version of the model I depict below. Like many who are interested in politics, I've been following the recent budget debates with interest. Beyond the issue specific partisanship (e.g. defunding NPR or Planned Parenthood), there is the larger issue of how much government can afford to provide a social safety net. As the simplified model based on this paper argues, the desire to help others is based in large part on appraisals of how scarce resources are and how deserving people are of those resources.

This is basically common sense, but the interesting part is when we combine the model with research suggesting that conservatives are more likely than liberals to react to threats and avoid negative outcomes, suggesting that in the first decision box, even given the same facts, conservatives are more likely than liberals to believe that scarce resources(e.g. the budget deficit) are likely to lead to ruin and therefore cut public assistance. For example, this might explain why a recent Pew Research Poll found that Republicans feel that the deficit is a bigger economic priority than adding more jobs (37% vs 22%), while the numbers were reversed for Democrats (41% think jobs is the most important economic concern vs. 15% for the deficit).

Further, when you get to the second decision box (appraising deservingness), conservatives are more likely to attribute success and failure to internal-controllable causes vs. liberals. For example, this is a graph of yourmorals.org data and you'll notice that conservatives are more likely to attribute their success at work and in relationships to effort (an internal-controllable trait) versus ability (internal, but not necessarily controllable) or context/luck (external). This attributional divide has been documented in other published research.

When you combine these two factors, it is no surprise that liberals and conservatives have very different ideas about a social safety net. Each group may be psychologically predisposed to believing in more or less scarcity and more or less personal responsibility for outcomes, even given the same information about the world.

These dispositions may actually also cause people to be more liberal or conservative, or to support such policies, as research on mortality salience has succeeded in increasing support for conservative candidates. There is a lack of research on causes of liberalism, but anecdotally, Michael Moore recently told a liberal audience that "America is not broke." and in my anecdotal experience of religion, one of the main principles of many liberal churches is the idea that we need to think of the world as full of abundance, not scarcity. The ironic thing is that just when people need help most (conditions of scarcity) and Keynesian economics would suggest we should spend more, the psychology of the situation predisposes us to be less generous. Of course, that's from my liberal point of view, where I'm predisposed to such beliefs.

- Ravi Iyer

ps If anyone knows of studies where an abundance mentality leads to liberal beliefs, I'd love to hear from you.

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Tagged as: abundance, budget deficit, keynesian economics, liberals and conservatives, scarcity Leave a comment

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Matt Fox
March 25th, 2011 - 13:51

Fascinating, as always, Ravi.

Vohs, Mead, and Goode (2006) actually find the opposite of what you’re suggesting (closer to what you seem to prefer). In their experiments, abundance essentially primes self-sufficiency, a more conservative value, leading people to be less generous with their time and money, while scarcity promotes more communal motivations, leading to greater generosity, and stronger desires to be closer to others. They don’t break it down by political affiliation.

I’m not sure scarcity taps into the same kind of existential threat as the terror management literature, but it should be noted that even existential threats can lead to generosity, it’s just targeted towards narrowly defined ingroups (e.g. domestic, rather than international charities), which as you know, is perfectly consistent with you and your colleagues’ work on conservative values.
Ravi
March 25th, 2011 - 14:14

Very good points, Matthew. I’ll lookup that study and consider amending my thoughts on the mapping of scarcity/abundance and conservative/liberal orientations. I have had people point out before that I sometimes forget that conservative generosity may just be aimed at close groups, such that it is mis-measured as overall lack of generosity and it’s something I should continue to remind myself to consider.
Ravi
March 26th, 2011 - 00:27

Matt, I just looked at those studies and in them, they remind people of money, which I think is very different than feeling like you have an abundance of wealth. Indeed, I might even argue that being reminded of money primes materialism and feelings of social comparison to others who might have more. The feeling of being reminded of money might be the opposite of the feeling of abundance. For those who are interested, this is a link to the paper being referred to.

https://cms.csom.umn.edu/assets/71704.pdf
Matt Fox
March 30th, 2011 - 08:01

It’s a nine study article, so it takes some digesting. Most of the studies focus on money, in and of itself, but experiments 2 (read about growing up with abundant or scarce financial resources) and 5 (large or small amounts of Monopoly money left in view after game) tease out abundance and scarcity. For the most part, behavior in the abundance conditions seem consistent with the money prime, so Vohs has some basis to argue that it’s the same psychological mechanism, but there’s ample room for future research to clarify what’s happening. The article’s published in Science, so if you really want to understand what they did, you might need to dig into the supplementary materials a bit – which I haven’t done.
Ravi
April 12th, 2011 - 10:25

Thanks for pointing that out, Matthew. Focusing on study 2, I would still think that reading about growing up with a lot of money and imagining that perspective is likely to produce a state of desire, rather than a state of satiation. That would make logical sense given that the outcome of the study was keeping at working at an impossible task, something that one might do out of a sense of desire, rather than need. The same mechanism might operate in Study 5, where they imagine a future of wealth. I think the effects of the Vohs paper are interesting and real, but I still would say that it taps a different psychological variable (money salience/desire) than Skitka’s studies. It would be interesting to tease apart Vohs’ studies to differentiate the desire for money (e.g. think about somebody else’s wealth or your future wealth) from the satiation of money (e.g. think about your own wealth compared to others who have less).

btw, if ever you want to write a guest post on the YM blog about some of your thoughts on these issues, feel free. I appreciate your insights.

- Ravi
Ravi
April 12th, 2011 - 10:28

also, if you wanted to help design such materials, I’d collaborate and run such a study as suggested above on yourmorals.org.