The Economic Other: Inequality in the American Political Imagination 9780226691909

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The Economic Other

The Economic Other Inequality in the American Political Imagination

Meghan Condon and Amber Wichowsky

The University of Chicago Press c h i c a g o & l o n d o n

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2020 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2020 Printed in the United States of America 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-69173-2 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-69187-9 (paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-69190-9 (e-book) DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226691909.001.0001 “A Litany for Survival.” Copyright © 1978 by Audre Lorde, from The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde by Audre Lorde. Used by permission of  W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Condon, Meghan, author. | Wichowsky, Amber, author. Title: The economic other : inequality in the American political imagination / Meghan Condon, Amber Wichowsky. Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019050467 | ISBN 9780226691732 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226691879 (paperback) | ISBN 9780226691909 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Equality—United States—Public opinion. | Social comparison—Political aspects—United States. | Income distribution— Political aspects—United States. Classification: LCC JC575 .C663 2020 | DDC 320.973/09051—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019050467 This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

1

The Politics of Social Comparison

2 3 4 5

P a r t I Imagining the Economic Other Inequality in the Social Mind Revealing the Social Mind The Disadvantaged Other The Advantaged Other

13 32 42 67

P a r t I I Responding to the Economic Other 6 Social Comparison and Status Perceptions 7 Social Comparison and Support for Redistribution

91 108

P a r t I I I Insulated from Inequality Why Americans Don’t Look Up Why Americans Would Rather Look Down How Looking Up Keeps Us Down The Power of Social Comparison

125 155 169 184

8 9 10 11

Acknowledgments 203 Appendix 207 Notes 219 References 249 Index 271

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Chapter 1

The Politics of Social Comparison Life for both sexes—and I looked at them, shouldering their way along the pavement—is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle. It calls for gigantic courage and strength. More than anything, perhaps, creatures of illusion as we are, it calls for confidence in oneself. Without self-confidence we are as babes in the cradle. And how can we generate this imponderable quality, which is yet so invaluable, most quickly? By thinking that other people are inferior to oneself. By feeling that one has some innate superiority—it may be wealth, or rank, a straight nose, or the portrait of a grandfather by Romney—for there is no end to the pathetic devices of the human imagination—over other people. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 1929 And there is deep down within all of us an instinct. It’s a kind of drum major instinct—a desire to be out front, a desire to lead the parade, a desire to be first. And it is something that runs the whole gamut of life. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., The Drum Major Instinct, 1968

The human imagination is an engine of comparison. We get our bearings in a complex, changing world by comparing ourselves to other people. These comparisons shape the way we see the social order and ourselves; they govern our desires and our discontents. They are often automatic, driven by context and impulse, so much so that they can happen just beneath our awareness. But often, if we think back, we can recognize them. What social comparisons have you made today, or even in the past hour? Have you compared yourself to coworkers, neighbors, people in the media or on the street, even just for a moment? Did the comparisons bring you up or down? Did you aspire— covet—pity—condescend? Do you think these kinds of everyday comparisons matter at all for the way you see politics? In this book, we ask similar questions, but from a much broader perspective. What kind of social comparisons are encouraged by an increasingly unequal America, and what are the consequences for our shared political and economic future? Social comparisons take many forms, but our focus will be on cross-class comparison. Here, at the outset of the book, take a moment to try out this experience for yourself. Imagine another person who is at the very top of our

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Chapter 1

socioeconomic hierarchy—someone rich, prestigious, elite. Whom do you think of ? How are you different from this person? How do you feel about yourself, the other person, or the social system in general when you make this comparison? Now imagine someone at the other end of the hierarchy. Who comes to mind when you think of the poor? How are you different from this second imagined other? What reactions do you notice in yourself ? In the real world, context and psychology combine to direct attention up or down and govern the images that come to mind. How often, under what conditions, and with what political results do these cross-class comparisons occur? On one hand, there is reason to believe that downward comparison dominates. Nearly a century ago, Virginia Woolf explained that imagining lower-status others is an efficient way to feel confident and secure. Contemporary social scientists have repeatedly confirmed her observation; downward comparison can elevate a person’s sense of their own status, even when markers of status like money or achievements do not change. In an era marked by rapidly growing economic insecurity, perhaps people are especially drawn to this kind of thinking, driven by what Martin Luther King Jr. called the drum major instinct: the human desire to engage in downward comparison to elevate the self. What might the consequences be for politics? Both Woolf and King emphasized that comparison with others structures not only individual perception and self-concept, but power relations. King argued that the drum major instinct lies at the roots of racial resentment, because people often satisfy their drive to compare downward by focusing on members of marginalized racial groups.1 Woolf made a similar argument about gender. She viewed the drum major instinct as foundational to patriarchy, arguing that men are able to elevate themselves by drawing upon, “that deep seated desire, not so much that she shall be inferior as that he shall be superior.” In fact, Woolf called downward social comparison “one of the chief sources of [a man’s] power.”2 Unlike downward comparison, upward comparisons can foster anxiety, weaken confidence, and lower perception of status. Olympic medalists provide a tidy illustration of these dynamics. Bronze medalists often appear happier on the Olympic podium than silver medalists. Psychologists interested in this puzzling phenomenon have studied it carefully; in one clever study, researchers looked only at the faces of medalists, blinded as to which medal the athlete won. Indeed, they consistently rated bronze medalists’ faces as happier than silver medalists’. The reason turns out to be a difference in the direction of social comparison. Bronze medalists tend to compare downward, contrasting themselves with those who did not win a medal at all, feeling thrilled just

The Politics of Social Comparison

3

to have made the podium. Silver medalists tend to compare upward, focusing on the athlete who won gold, experiencing the sense of loss.3 As Woolf, King, and a massive body of contemporary research demonstrate, it feels good to be a drum major, to think of the band behind and feel out in front. It empowers, elevates, and changes expectations. This line of thinking tells us that it is much less pleasant to think of a long parade stretching for miles ahead (or to look up at the glint of the gold medal). And yet, whether we are looking back at history or into the mirror of present popular culture, we do find upward comparison. America has a longstanding appetite for news from the top. From Benjamin Franklin and Andrew Carnegie to Rich Dad, Poor Dad and television’s Shark Tank,4 homilies on the gospel of wealth ring from the public pulpit. Our elected leaders increasingly hail from the upper classes.5 And modern celebrity culture relentlessly draws attention to gold medalists of today’s society.6 In particular, when it comes to American political rhetoric, there is certainly no shortage of upward comparison. Candidates and leaders seem almost unaware of how bad upward comparisons can feel. Progressive Democrats like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders consistently direct Americans’ attention to disparities between the rich and the rest, telling Americans to “look around. Oil companies guzzle down the billions in profits. Billionaires pay a lower tax rate than their secretaries, and Wall Street CEOs, the same ones that direct our economy and destroyed millions of jobs still strut around Congress, no shame, demanding favors, and acting like we should thank them” (Elizabeth Warren, September 2012). Economic disparities were the core problem put forth by the Sanders presidential campaign in 2016. Crowds cheered on as the candidate preached about the economic divide: “If you can believe it, between 2013 and 2015 the 14 wealthiest individuals in the country saw their net worth increase by over $157 billion” (Bernie Sanders, June 2015). Moderate Democrats, like Hillary Clinton, chimed in too: “We do need to make sure our economy works for everyone, not just those at the top. The changes that have roiled our economy over the past few decades are not just numbers on a page that economists study. They are real forces that families are dealing with up close and personal every day” (Hillary Clinton, July 2016). Upward comparisons persisted into the 2020 presidential campaign season. Elizabeth Warren, now a presidential hopeful, told attendees at a televised town hall meeting: “I’m tired of a Washington that works for the rich and the powerful. I want a Washington that works for the rest of America” (Elizabeth Warren, April 2019). Sanders, again a frontrunner, held the line too, going so far as to argue that “billionaires should not exist” (Bernie Sanders, September

4

Chapter 1

2019). Warren and Sanders were joined by others in the Democratic field, like Julián Castro, who directed attention to the contrast between his supporters and the rich on Twitter: “I’m not a billionaire, and neither are any of my donors” (Julián Castro, August 2019). And it’s not always just the Left drawing Americans’ attention up; similar rhetoric began to echo from the other side of the political aisle in 2015. After years of accusing Democrats of class warfare, Republicans began to talk about income inequality. Jeb Bush’s 2016 presidential campaign and his Political Action Committee were titled “Right to Rise.” The PAC’s mission statement asserted, “While the last eight years have been pretty good ones for top earners, they’ve been a lost decade for the rest of America.” Marco Rubio called for the Republican Party to “become the champion of the working class,” focusing on the connection between inequality and political influence: “If you can afford to hire an army of lawyers, lobbyists, and others to help you navigate and sometimes influence the law, you’ll benefit. And so that’s why you see big banks, big companies, keep winning. And everybody else is stuck and being left behind” (Marco Rubio, April 2015). Even self-proclaimed billionaire Donald Trump—who would go on to win in 2016—joined in: “The middle class is getting clobbered in this country. . . . You know the middle class built this country, not the hedge fund guys, but I know people in hedge funds that pay almost nothing and it’s ridiculous” (Donald Trump, August 2016).7 Are these politicians shouting into a void? Examples of how much people dislike the silver medalist vantage point abound, and yet here we have candidates trying to garner votes repeatedly asking Americans to look upward. Furthermore, quite a bit of public opinion scholarship suggests that Americans are generally unresponsive to economic inequality, ignorant of its magnitude or perhaps viewing it as acceptable as long as everyone has a chance to compete for gold. Why, then, is there so much attention to inequality and in particular upward comparison, in campaigns and speeches? In the chapters that follow, we provide an answer by explaining the central role of social comparison. Americans are quite sensitive to inequality when they think about it in terms of social contrast. Powerful currents compete to propel Americans’ attention up or down—toward the rich or the poor— pulling politics along in the wake. In particular, though the experience of upward comparison may not always be pleasant, it can change how people view government action. In each of the references to inequality we just quoted from speeches and campaign messages, the speaker talks about interpersonal, social differences between people: between billionaires and secretaries, finan-

The Politics of Social Comparison

5

ciers and families, scions who hire teams of lawyers and workers who fight for scraps. In the minds of Americans, socioeconomic disparities are indeed “not just numbers on a page that economists study,” and when these gaps are framed instead as social contrasts, Americans of all political affiliations and walks of life rev up their engines of comparison and respond.

W h a t C a n S o c i a l C o m pa r i s o n T e l l U s a b o u t t h e P o l i t i c s o f I n e q ua l i t y ? Woolf ’s patriarch, King’s drum major, and the sad silver medalists are only a few among many illustrations of the power and prevalence of social comparison. Examples from psychology to literature suggest that such comparisons happen across many contexts but are particularly important when people are faced with social structures that are complex or unfamiliar. In these contexts, humans act like creatures equipped with a social sonar—forming images of the environment and their own location in it by bouncing their self-concepts against the others in their purview. And yet, social comparison across class lines has received little attention in many prominent attempts to understand Americans’ responses to one of the most complex and rapid shifts to the social order in a generation—the dramatic rise in economic inequality since the middle of the last century. We are left with many unanswered questions about the national reaction to growing inequality. When and under what conditions do Americans consider the economically mighty and the weak? What do they think about when they compare themselves to others across the class divide? How do those contrasts make them feel about themselves? And what, if anything, do they want government to do about it all? These questions puzzle social scientists and political observers alike, making American attitudes about inequality one of the great unsolved mysteries in the social sciences. In particular, public opinion in the United States has not responded to rising income inequality the way many experts predicted it would. The longstanding expectation has been that as inequality increases, and more people fall farther from the top earners, the public will demand more redistributive action from government: people will recognize their slipping status; concern about inequality will boom; support for a government response will grow. But the reality runs contrary to this expectation. Americans have trouble identifying their own positions in the changing economic hierarchy, and appetite for economic redistribution has remained relatively stable for decades.

6

Chapter 1

The connections between Americans’ opinions and socioeconomic status— which social scientists often capture by looking at individuals’ incomes and resources—remain weak and hard to predict. Explanations for the inconsistency tend to ignore social relations and comparison, instead characterizing individual Americans as either ignorant: lacking the factual knowledge to respond rationally to growing inequality, or tolerant: accepting of inequality because of fierce individualism, ideology, or deeply held beliefs about mobility and the American Dream. Both of these approaches assume that something about individual Americans renders them immune to the status changes that come from rising inequality: perhaps they do not know, or perhaps they do not care about the yawning gaps that characterize the American socioeconomic landscape. These answers dominate the discourse and are important pieces of the puzzle, but they are, at some level, still unsatisfying. Though Americans have a hard time describing the details of the income distribution in quantitative terms, most have the basic facts right, and most are aware that inequality is large and growing fast. And large numbers of Americans express concern about these facts.8 In this book, we take a new social approach. Instead of focusing on what Americans know about inequality, what they believe, or the resources they possess individually, we look at how Americans’ systems of social sonar are functioning. We investigate the opportunities people have (or lack) to confront others who are economically different, how people select preferred targets for comparison to boost a sense of self in the midst of anxiety-producing change, and how people respond when they think about the differences between themselves and this economic other. Because we are interested in understanding the response to economic inequality, we focus on cross-class comparisons, but we point out that social comparative thinking can never be scrubbed of race or gender the way statistical information about broad economic trends can be. Barack Obama, in his Farewell Address, echoed King’s argument that satisfying the drum major instinct with racial difference draws attention away from economic inequality. He evoked upward and downward comparisons, warning that the divide between the rich and the rest would only grow if poverty continued to be racialized: “If every economic issue is framed as a struggle between a hard-working white middle class and an undeserving minority, then workers of all shades are going to be left fighting for scraps while the wealthy withdraw further into their private enclaves” (Barack Obama, January 2017). As Obama argued, class is welded to other social categories in the American imagination.

The Politics of Social Comparison

7

And so, we also examine the ways in which the intersection of class, race, and gender influences both which comparisons Americans make and how they react to them. Our goal is to move beyond the dominant individualfocused resource, information, and ideology-based models of inequality and public opinion, drawing attention instead to how patterns in social relations shape the American response to inequality.

T h e C o m pa r i s o n s W e M a k e a n d H o w T h e y M a t t e r While there has been little attention to the specific question of how crossclass comparison affects political attitudes, there is considerable evidence from across the social sciences showing that attitudes and emotions, broadly constructed, are quite sensitive to cross-class social comparison. Take, for example, a natural experiment provided by airplane passenger classes: air rage is more common among economy passengers in flights that have a first-class cabin, and also more prevalent on front-boarding flights, where economy passengers have to pass by already seated first-class passengers, in contrast to middle-boarding flights, where economy passengers are not directly confronted with an upward social comparison. Air rage is also more prevalent among first-class passengers when economy-class passengers pass through first class on their way to their seats, a finding that is consistent with other social psychological experiments showing that downward comparisons with the disadvantaged cause higher-status individuals to respond with feelings of entitlement and contempt for the less fortunate.9 In many of these studies, upward comparison evokes resentment, and downward comparison often makes people scornful and stingy, rather than magnanimous or empathetic. Does something similar happen to political reactions? This is where we begin. In part I of the book, we make the case for focusing on cross-class social comparison if the goal is to understand the political response to inequality, and then we listen to Americans’ own descriptions of the people and concerns that come to mind when they think of the rich and the poor: who do they see boarding this plane? First, we present a theoretical model of attitude formation centered on the social perception of inequality in chapter 2, further explaining the importance of social comparison and our expectations. This theory calls for an analytical shift away from absolute resources and statistical reasoning, and toward social comparative thinking and relative status. In chapter 3, we discuss the methodological challenges created by such a shift and explain how we address them through a combination of large-scale experiments, qualitative research, and analysis of survey data. The book’s first

8

Chapter 1

two empirical chapters then leverage these data to examine Americans’ perceptions of the disadvantaged other (chapter 4) and the advantaged other (chapter 5). In part II, we ask how cross-class comparisons govern Americans’ perceptions of their own status (chapter 6) and their political attitudes about redistributive spending (chapter 7). We find that while many Americans misperceive their place in the income distribution, social comparison with people who are economically different can make them more accurate, even when no factual information about the income distribution is provided. And though there is a deep disconnect between rising inequality and Americans’ preferences for redistribution, when Americans think about the differences between themselves and a person at the top of the socioeconomic hierarchy, their support for several social programs grows. The results in the second part of the book, in a sense, make the puzzle with which we began even more puzzling: if American opinion is sensitive to falling status perceptions, why no groundswell of support for social spending? Resolving this puzzle requires looking beyond how Americans react to cross-class comparison and asking how much and with whom they compare. What we find is that America is increasingly a middle boarding flight, with people of different classes making their way through life with fewer and fewer experiences of comparison with the economic other. While political elites do try to draw attention to social contrast in their stump speeches and campaign messages, directing voters’ social gaze both up and down as we saw in the snippets of campaign rhetoric we quoted earlier, that sort of political communication makes up only a sliver of Americans’ social experience. The rest of the American socioeconomic landscape is increasingly structured to prevent Americans from thinking in terms of social contrast, especially when it comes to the differences between themselves and the rich.10 Part III presents three major countervailing forces that insulate American politics from the effects of interpersonal cross-class comparisons. First, growing geographic income segregation and media portrayals of wealth combine to restrict opportunities people have to experience contrast with the economic other, especially with the most advantaged Americans. But when Americans do have opportunities to contrast themselves with an advantaged other in their communities, they are more accurate about their relative position in the socioeconomic hierarchy and more supportive of redistribution (chapter 8). Second, rising economic anxiety further inhibits Americans from thinking about the differences between themselves and the socioeconomic elite. Given the choice, people prefer not to think about the economic other at all, but when

The Politics of Social Comparison

9

they experience economic anxiety, many turn to downward comparisons to protect their sense of self in uncertain times (chapter 9). Third, while upward comparison alters opinion about government action, it also suppresses political efficacy—inducing many Americans to want more from their government, but at the same time to feel less confident about their own capacity to make those demands (chapter 10). Race and gender undergird all three of these forces: structuring opportunity for social cross-class contact, increasing anxieties, shaping stereotypes of the rich and poor, and providing a means for many people to avoid thinking in terms of uncomfortable class disadvantages, just as Woolf and King described. Cross-class social comparison also interacts with race and gender to affect some people’s political attitudes more than others’. In all of these ways, attention to social comparison reveals the impossibility of solving mysteries about class and American politics without investigating race and gender. Throughout the book, we will point out many ways in which race and gender determine the nature and impact of cross-class social comparison. In doing so, we aim to complicate what we think has become an oversimplified dichotomy between class politics and what is sometimes referred to as identity politics. We focus on gender and race because of their deep political importance, persistent intersection with economic status, and centrality in stereotypes about class groups. However, we recognize that other social identities and cleavages might matter in similar ways, structuring people’s experiences of and responses to cross-class social comparison. So, while race and gender are often built into the design of our studies and featured prominently in the interpretation of our results, we also discuss other social cleavages, including partisanship and political ideology. We also note here that we use the term “race” throughout the book for simplicity’s sake, but perhaps a more accurate term for the construct we are examining would be ethno-racial identity. In particular, Latino ethnicity is often racialized in American political rhetoric and attitudes, especially in immigration debates, and we will examine its importance along with other racial identities.11 Attention to social comparison—its prevalence, our responses to it, and in some cases our resistance to it—uncovers an important way in which inequality is reinforcing. In chapter 11, we ask whether the reinforcing patterns identified throughout the book can be interrupted. Can comparison-resistant Americans be encouraged to consider the economic other? Are there conditions under which people look down at the poor and experience generosity and empathy? Are there conditions under which people look up at the rich and still feel mobilized? In considering each of these questions, we set forth an

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Chapter 1

agenda for the study of the social perception of inequality, and suggest strategies that could be applied by political and community actors grounded in a fuller understanding of social comparison as an important power resource.

P o l i t i c s a n d t h e H u m a n I m ag i nat i o n Scores of thinkers throughout history have reminded us that our feelings, attitudes, and actions are driven by what Virginia Woolf called “devices of the human imagination—over other people.” We reference several of these philosophers, writers, artists, and scientists throughout the book. In the Western canon, the basic concepts go back to ancient philosophers. Aristotle was deeply interested in relative perception: “[People] disagree about what happiness is . . . indeed the same person keeps changing his mind, since in sickness he thinks it is health, in poverty wealth. And when they are conscious of their own ignorance, they admire anyone who speaks of something grand and beyond them.”12 How exactly we construct these others in our minds has great consequence for the ways in which we relate to each other and see ourselves. Politics does not lie beyond this realm of the social imagination. Political feelings, attitudes, and actions are driven by the human imagination’s constant process of social comparison. The central premise of this book is that understanding the politics of inequality in America requires investigating cross-class social comparison and the perception of status. It is not just where we stand on the podium that matters. The world around us might make us look up; the drives within us might make us look down. The politics of a silver medal society are quite different from bronze, and it is worth investigating which one we live in now.

Chapter 2

Inequality in the Social Mind It is a time when one is filled with vague longings; when one dreams of flight to peaceful islands in the remote solitudes of the sea, or folds his hands and says, What is the use of struggling, and toiling and worrying any more? let us give it all up. Mark Twain, The Gilded Age, 1873

The phrase Gilded Age is getting a second life in America, and for good reason. In a steady march over the past 40 years, we have moved back to economic divides last seen a century ago. Between 1980 and 2016, the top 1 percent’s share of the national income doubled from 10 to 20 percent. At the same time, fortunes reversed for the lower half; these Americans slipped from holding a fifth of the national income to only 13 percent. An Economic Policy Institute study found that in 15 states, people in the top 1 percent were the only ones to recover from the Great Recession,1 and only the incomes of Americans in the top 10 percent have kept pace with economic growth. The rest of Americans find themselves with a relatively small and shrinking slice of the economic pie. And whether we focus on statistical patterns, cultural anxieties, or fears about the demise of democracy, right now America does look quite a bit like the earlier Gilded Age that inspired Twain’s novel of the same name.2 There is good evidence that today’s growing divide leaves most Americans materially and psychologically worse off, and undermines our cherished ideals, like opportunity and democratic representation.3 But now too, it can seem like Americans are folding up their hands and asking, “What is the use?”

A r e A m e r i c a n s I m m u n e to I n e q ua l i t y ? Contrary to expectations, we do not see much evidence that the American government is facing greater pressure to redistribute income downward as market inequality increases. The canonical theory of opinion about redistribution focuses on individually held resources, primarily income differences.

14 Chapter 2

This “traditional resource model” predicts that as more people fall farther from the top earners, they will want government to do more to even the playing field. But in the US, though Americans may think that income differences between rich and poor are too large, the share of the public agreeing that the government should do something to close the gap has held relatively stable.4 In figure 2.1 we plot support for redistribution using data collected in the General Social Survey (GSS) between 1978 and 2018. Over the last four decades, the GSS has asked respondents whether they agree that “the government in Washington ought to reduce the income differences between the rich and poor,” measuring agreement with a seven-point scale that ranges from 1 “government should” to 7 “government should not.”5 The GSS first asked this question in 1978—the year the income distribution in the United States was at its most egalitarian—and has continued to ask it nearly every year since. Figure 2.1 also shows how income inequality has changed over the same time period, tracing the Gini coefficient, a standard metric of income inequality.6 Americans’ belief that government has a responsibility to reduce income differences waxes and wanes over this period, shifting somewhat in the conservative direction in the early 1990s, then in the liberal direction in the mid2000s, before turning once again in the conservative direction in recent years. 

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F i g u r e 2 . 1 . Support for Redistribution and Income Inequality Note: Average support for redistribution. Source: General Social Survey (GSS) Cumulative File, 1972–2014. Gini coefficients come from the US Census Bureau’s Income and Poverty in the United States (P-60) report.

Inequality in the Social Mind

15

This zigzagging opinion shows little correspondence to the second line illustrating the steady upward march of inequality.7 The survey question about government doing more is a routine metric of support for redistributive action, but it is possible that scholars are looking in the wrong place. A generic question about whether individuals think government should do more to close the income gap captures policy preferences imperfectly. Americans tend to be ideologically conservative, wary of government action in general, but programmatically liberal when it comes to specific questions about policies, and so it is possible that this abstract measure may mask opinion change about specific government action.8 But even if we drill down into attitudes about specific public policies, we see that support for redistributive spending does not track with growing income disparities. Since the early 1970s, the GSS has asked Americans whether government spending in various areas is too much, too little, or about right. We look at net support for three policy types: means-tested programs (welfare); contributory programs based on labor market participation (Social Security); and opportunity-enhancing programs (education). To do so we follow a standard convention in which public support for spending is measured with net spending scores—taking the difference between the percentage saying too little and the percentage saying too much.9 As before, we also include the trend line for income inequality to show how spending support has tracked with changes to the income distribution (Figure 2.2). The same lack of correspondence between inequality and opinion shows up. There is no strong relationship between preferences for spending on welfare and Social Security and income inequality. The relationship between support for education spending and inequality was positive and strong in the 1980s, but disappears in the 1990s, with inequality and support running in opposite directions. Support for these programs zigzags up and down like opinion on the generic survey questions while inequality marches up.10 The Information Deficit Perspective There is a tendency among experts to assume these inconsistencies are due, at least in part, to factual ignorance. If only Americans knew the true extent of income differences, the argument goes, then they would be more supportive of policies that address the class divide. And indeed, many Americans underestimate the extent of income differences11 and overstate their own social position.12 Such inaccuracies have led researchers in this school of thought to conclude that Americans suffer from a fatal information deficit when it comes

Chapter 2 













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F i g u r e 2 . 2 . Support for Redistributive Programs and Income Inequality Note: Net spending scores calculated as the difference between the percentage saying too little and the percentage saying too much. Source: General Social Survey (GSS) Cumulative File, 1972–2014. Gini coefficients come from the US Census Bureau’s Income and Poverty in the United States (P-60) report.

to opinion formation. This perspective has given rise of late to a torrent of calculators, infographics, and newspaper articles communicating facts about the income distribution in the popular media. Outlets like the New York Times and the Pew Research Center offer interactive demonstrations where readers can enter their incomes and find out whether they are in the middle class or not, or in which percentile of the national or local distribution they fall. These and other data journalistic endeavors paper the internet in pie charts, density curves, percentiles, and shares of income held by specific segments of the population, looking to change perspectives with a little after-class tutoring in numeracy. But though Americans have trouble calling to mind specific facts about the income distribution and have trouble accurately explaining it with numbers and graphics, they consistently report, when asked, that income gaps are large and growing. Americans know the trends; they just aren’t responding. Additionally, the information deficit perspective downplays the social nature of inequality. In doing so, it misses several truths about the American sociopolitical landscape. Outside of an experimental environment, people often do not organize the social world in statistical terms, and they are rarely provided with customized information about their own socioeconomic status or rela-

Inequality in the Social Mind

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tive income, as they are in the behavioral economic studies and online calculators. The reach of such calculators is limited to the segments of the New York Times readership and people visiting the Pew Research website who then also choose to take the time to use these inequality tools, likely people who are already relatively informed and concerned about inequality. We, the authors of a book on inequality, have explored these tools; perhaps our readers have too. But in the wider nation, factual, quantified information is quite removed from how a great many people experience economic inequality, and so the lessons we can learn from these studies, while important, are limited. The Ideological Acceptance Perspective Perhaps then, Americans’ opinions are immune to inequality because they do not see it as a problem. Americans are generally more accepting of income disparities that are seen as a legitimate result of differences in talent and effort13 and they draw a line between the economic sphere, where differentiation is tolerated, and the political, where it is not.14 Stemming from these basic findings, a robust tradition of scholarship on American politics argues that Americans’ acceptance of social inequality is not due to a lack of awareness of inequality; instead, it emerges from a culture marked by strong beliefs that legitimize inequality.15 Americans’ democratic spirit is buttressed by an egalitarian ethos: people possess equal worth, they should be afforded equal opportunity, and their interests deserve equal consideration. But Americans also support a capitalist economy that promotes the pursuit of profit through self-interest and encourages individuals to acquire as much wealth as possible. As a result of these two commitments, when Americans think about inequality, many need to believe that everyone gets what they deserve.16 This belief in a “just world” serves an adaptive function, allowing individuals to deal with their social environments as if they were orderly and predictable.17 Under this worldview, inequality is not a problem to be solved by government action. And so, the American Dream—the idea that you can achieve upward mobility through hard work—courses through the American ethos. According to Jennifer Hochschild, a political scientist who is one of the foremost experts on attitudes about the American Dream, it has been attached to everything from religious freedom to a home in the suburbs, and it has inspired emotions ranging from deep satisfaction to disillusioned fury. Nevertheless, the phrase elicits for most Americans

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some variant of Locke’s fantasy—a new world where anything can happen and good things might.18 And yet, faith in the American Dream has faltered in the new Gilded Age. According to surveys conducted by the Pew Charitable Trusts, the share of Americans who said the American Dream was “very alive” decreased by nearly 50 percent between 1986 and 2011, while the share of Americans who said it was “not really alive” more than doubled. A majority of Americans (52%) do not think their children will have the opportunities to succeed than they did.19 A 2015 survey conducted by the Harvard University Institute of Politics found that nearly half of millennials (18–29-year-olds) think the American Dream is dead.20 These trends suggest a growing willingness to see inequality as a public problem and not merely a characteristic of a just world full of strivers and shirkers. Something is missing from this story. Americans’ socioeconomic positions, marked by their resources, do not reliably predict attitudes about inequality, and arguments for American immunity to inequality, either because of factual ignorance or ideology, go only part of the way and are countered by survey responses in which Americans repeatedly state that they both know and care about growing inequality. Here, we wonder whether researchers may be shining the spotlight on too narrow a set of possible explanations. The traditional resource model that drew attention to the puzzle of redistribution in the first place, as well as the information deficit and ideological acceptance perspectives, all look for answers by digging ever deeper into the American individual—examining incomes, knowledge, values, and beliefs. But inequality is a social phenomenon, and it is, by definition, relational. Might it be that Americans are navigating economic inequality the way they navigate relationships, communities, and groups? What then would we learn by focusing on the social nature of inequality—looking less at what Americans possess, know, or value, and instead paying attention to who they think about when they consider the rich and poor, how often they are confronted with those sorts of social contrasts, and what happens when they make them? Would the American response make more sense? Would this all be less mysterious?

The Social Perception Perspective We turn now to an alternative way to think about responses to inequality, one based in a vein of research separate from those we have discussed above: a

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group of studies conducted primarily by social psychologists demonstrating the wide-ranging importance of social comparison across domains of human life. We draw this research into dialogue with theory from across the social sciences to develop an alternative explanation for the anemic American response to growing inequality.21 We will argue (and then throughout the book demonstrate) that cross-class social comparison matters deeply to status perceptions and political attitudes. In particular, upward comparisons make people perceive their status as lower and make them want government to do more to redistribute wealth and increase opportunity. But American society today is increasingly structured in ways that prevent these upward comparisons. In short, rather than being ignorant or tolerant of inequality, Americans are socially shielded from it.22 To Compare Is Human Whether we are talking about Olympic medalists, airline passengers, or our neighbors, humans are social thinkers. When it comes to sense of self and hierarchy, as Virginia Woolf noted, people are clever “creatures of illusion,” or perhaps, more charitably, creatures of flexible perception. Children compare themselves to others starting at a very young age. As parents ourselves, we regularly hear our young children proclaim they are taller or shorter, faster or slower than siblings and classmates. It turns out these sorts of comparisons help their cognitive development, facilitating the application of abstract knowledge to new instances. Social comparisons become even more frequent during the elementary school years as children confront more complex social arrangements and develop ideas about their abilities.23 Take this example, which we observed recently while talking to one of our own children, a kindergartener memorizing the calendar. Like the income distribution for adults, the annual calendar is actually a rather complex thing for a young mind to make sense of: we use it to mark the year—a massive amount of time for a person who has only seen a few of them; that year is divided into the unwieldy number of 12 months, each with a long, Latinate name and no logical order, and it all repeats cyclically. The child in question, newly acquainted with this complex arrangement, used social comparison with peers to make sense of it all: “I was born in June; Alex was born in April; I know I am younger than he is, so April comes first.” At first, this seems a pretty roundabout way to figure out the sequence of months, but it is actually a clever use of social comparison—one of the most important tools we all have to make sense of

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the world around us. Children continue to use social comparison to organize the ever more complex concepts they think about as they develop. In a recent conversation, the oldest among our children, an eleven-year-old considering possible futures for herself, started off simply asking what teachers, artists, and doctors earn. Quickly deciding that the raw numeric responses her mother was providing were wholly unuseful, and declaring sensibly, “$50 thousand and $200 thousand are both a lot,” she switched tactics and began asking whether specific friends and relations with various jobs earned more or less than the (now somewhat uncomfortable) political science professor answering the questions. As we progress into adulthood, our use of social comparison matures with us; as adults, we routinely rely on it to process information more efficiently and make judgments. It is no exaggeration to say that humans engage in comparative thinking whenever we process information about the self or others.24 In the constant tension between a desire to be seen as unique individuals and a craving for social belonging, people construct and reconstruct social categories and identities, relying on comparison to give shape and meaning to these constructs. We draw on these categories to make sense of our own place in the social parade: are we drum majors or not?25 We are also motivated to compare ourselves with others. Leon Festinger, who developed social comparison theory, argued that social comparisons help satisfy our needs to learn whether our opinions are correct and know what we are capable of doing. By comparing ourselves to others, we are able to assess our own characteristics, preferences, and abilities.26 Social comparisons also help satisfy our psychological needs for group identity and positive self-image; like Woolf ’s patriarch and King’s drum major, we regularly use comparisons to protect our “fragile selves” by selecting comparison referents that help boost our egos and self-conceptions.27 These comparisons have a profound effect; several studies beyond those of silver medalists document the power of social comparison over subjective perceptions of our own wellbeing. Studies have shown, for example, that our self-reported happiness fades a bit as higher-income neighbors move in next door.28 Comparison’s impact extends beyond attitudes, identities, and preferences to behavior, affecting consumption habits,29 motivating self-improvement efforts,30 and sparking social protest.31 In short, we all still possess something like the kindergartener’s instinct to figure out the calendar by arranging peers on it, approaching complex or new social arrangements by thinking in terms of similarities and differences between ourselves and other people.32 Social comparison is

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hardwired, and its circuitry powers our self-concepts, impressions of others, desires, attitudes, and behavior.33 Sour Milk and Cream: How Do Americans Respond to Cross-Class Comparison? Given its established, broad importance, it would be surprising if social comparison did not structure responses to economic inequality. Our democracy is a far cry from the ideal of the small, socially navigable Rousseauean state, which Enlightenment philosophers and the founders envisioned. Instead, we propose the idea that the American political economy is massive and complex enough that people likely rely on social comparison to negotiate it. People view the hierarchy, and their place in it, through reductive tactics: social metaphors like ladders and parades in which people are ordered, and through interpersonal comparisons: between billionaires and secretaries or first- and economy-class airline passengers. As social psychologist Michael Kraus and colleagues elegantly put it in a recent review of the literature on class perception, “the global rising tide of economic inequality is experienced at the interpersonal level.” We can find evidence of this kind of comparative thinking throughout political rhetoric and in the explanations Americans offer in their own words. For instance, in Studs Terkel’s oral history American Dreams: Lost and Found, people of all stripes draw on metaphor, class signals, and social comparison in their personal narratives about class, inequality, and mobility. In one interview, a woman named Linda, a resident of a wealthy suburb, explains her status with references to others and one particularly creative metaphor: “I didn’t exactly start out from sour milk, so I’m not that far away from the cream.”34 In this remark, Linda reveals that she thinks about her own status by thinking through her relative social distance between the worst “sour milk” and best off “cream” in society. How does this process work? How does thinking about specific interpersonal differences help a person make sense of wide-ranging socioeconomic phenomena? Several studies in psychology and sociology suggest that social class signals, behaviors that communicate class position in interpersonal interactions, are particularly important. Such signals include modes of speaking, aspects of appearance, and even objects like shoes. They are communicated frequently and rapidly, and then called to mind when thinking of other people.35

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Status Perception We will show that Linda is far from alone; Americans from all social classes and perspectives draw upon similar processes when navigating socioeconomic stratification. There is especially compelling evidence that people evaluate their current circumstances by comparing themselves to others. For example, sociologist Samuel Stouffer and his colleagues famously observed a sense of relative deprivation and its effects on sense of well-being in their study of military morale during World War II. They found that though African Americans stationed in the segregated South were objectively worse off, they were happier than those stationed in the North. Stouffer reasoned that differences in relative comparisons explained this finding: black soldiers felt better compared to worse-off black civilians in the South, while black soldiers felt worse compared to better-off black civilians in the North.36 Those stationed in the South were responding like the bronze medalists, while those in the North felt relatively deprived, like the silver medalists. The varied cross-disciplinary literature on social comparison leads us to expect that Americans’ perceptions of their own socioeconomic status will respond to cross-class social comparison like the perceptions of the medalists and soldiers, depending on which economic other is the target of their comparison. In particular, we expect that when people compare upward (with the wealthy), their perception of their own status will fall, and when they compare downward (with the poor), their perception of their own status will rise.37 We will show that the Americans in our studies demonstrate this sensitivity to comparison again and again: in what they write about their lives and imagined comparisons, and in their responses to experimental conditions that ask them to make comparisons. Public Opinion Our next core question is how these important social comparisons affect the formation of political attitudes. Democracy requires that citizens are able to freely communicate their preferences to elected leaders, and public opinion is central to American politics. There is a robust body of evidence in political science demonstrating that Americans bring their policy preferences to bear when they cast a ballot, and that policymakers are responsive to shifts in public mood.38 In fact, the social welfare policies that mitigate inequality, which we will examine in detail, appear to be among the most sensitive to changes in public opinion.39

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Warnings about inequality and democratic health often center on the receiving end of this relationship, with scholars and political actors raising alarms that inequality causes problems for democratic responsiveness: the degree to which representatives are aware of and act in accordance with constituents’ preferences. Indeed, when the rich and poor want different things from government, the rich are more likely to get what they want.40 Several structural factors play a role in this democratic inequality; for instance, the rich are overrepresented in interest groups and in political office and wield outsize influence on leaders through campaign contributions.41 But this is far from the whole story. We propose that inequality and the social patterns it creates also govern the very formation of our opinions, our preferences themselves.42 Specifically, the social comparisons we make, which themselves are a product of the economic and political environment in which we live, are fundamental to how we understand the social world and what we want from our government. Theoretical and empirical insights from across the social sciences lead us to this expectation. Political scientists have shown repeatedly that people look beyond their own pocketbooks when making political decisions generally, often relying on sociotropic information and group-level comparisons.43 And researchers in several fields have presented evidence indicating that when social comparisons with the advantaged generate feelings of relative deprivation, as they did for the soldiers Samuel Stouffer studied, they can sometimes fuel political demands in the form of mass protest.44 When it comes to public opinion about redistribution there is less to go on, but some creative researchers have begun to examine the relationship through field experiments. For example, political scientist Melissa Sands shows that the affluent become less inclined to support redistributive taxation when they come into contact with the poor on the street.45 A process of social comparison may lie at the heart of the effect of contact and context on redistributive attitudes, but that hypothesis has not, as of yet, been tested. Furthermore, what we know about crossclass contact’s effects on public opinion, as opposed to other outcomes like protest, focuses almost exclusively on the contact that the wealthy have with the poor, looking at how experiences of downward contact alter the opinions held by the wealthy. It is still unknown whether upward comparison, contact with the rich, affects the preferences of the great majority of Americans who are not affluent themselves. Moving away from field research on politics and broad social movements back into the tightly controlled world of social psychology laboratory experiments, we find repeated results showing that social comparison affects

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people’s attitudes about private donations and giving, with downward comparisons making people less generous and upward comparisons making them more so.46 It is possible that the phenomenon identified in these laboratory experiments extends to the public domain, with a sense of relative deprivation engendered by upward comparison driving attitudes about redistribution. There is early evidence that this may be the case; experiments with small convenience samples suggest that Americans’ perception of their subjective status relative to others has a stronger relationship with redistributive attitudes than absolute markers of status like education and income.47 We will follow the psychological literature in two ways to investigate the political importance of social comparison. First, though cross-class contact will play a large role in our story, we will not begin there. Rather than using contact to proxy social comparison, we will start by studying the comparisons themselves and their impact. Second, we will pay close attention to the effects of upward comparison on political attitudes. In sum, we expect that cross-class social comparison likely affects opinion about government action. In particular, we expect that upward comparison (with the wealthy) will spur greater demand for redistributive action. People who compare upward and see themselves as relatively lower on the ladder may think they stand to gain more or lose less, resulting in more support for redistribution.48 We will show that this is exactly what happens to Americans who make social comparisons with the rich, while comparing with the poor has more limited and varied effects on opinion about redistribution. How Much Cross-Class Comparison Happens in America? Looking at inequality this way leads then to a very different set of questions about the roots of the lackluster American response. If Americans’ perceived status and opinions are, as we have hypothesized, quite sensitive to inequality when it is framed in terms of interpersonal, social comparison, then it seems they are not immune to inequality at all. Instead, perhaps they are shielded from experiencing it socially, a conjecture that turns our focus away from individual characteristics and toward the American social context. Cross-class contact is perhaps the most intuitive feature of the socioeconomic context that governs comparison, and therefore the one with which we will begin. Earlier we discussed a study showing that airline passengers experience more anger in the front-loading flights, when the classes have to come into contact. As with the microcosm of the airplane, in the broader society, contextual forces certainly determine how often Americans confront

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people from other classes. But it is crucial to remember here that context and comparison are not synonyms. Even when silver and bronze medalists are both on the podium with gold, both in contact with the top, they make different comparisons. This analogy reminds us that the role of contextual factors does not stop with contact. Economic and social conditions also influence whether Americans actively seek to avoid thinking about cross-class contrast, even when confronted with a person of another class. Returning to the scene of the airplane, contextual forces determine whether people turn away and look out the window, so to speak, when the passengers from the other class walk by. So we will certainly ask whether the American context presents people with opportunities for cross-class comparison in their daily lives. But we also ask additional questions: when those experiences happen, are they directing attention upward or downward? Are those instances increasing or declining? Do people try to avoid thinking about some contrasts and gravitate toward others? And which contextual factors beyond contact influence desires to compare upward or downward? Declining Opportunity for Upward Comparison We look first at simple exposure to the economic other. Cross-class comparisons can be induced when social contexts increase the visibility and salience of the comparison.49 Social psychologists have shown that who compares with whom is often heavily shaped by who is tied to whom and that social comparisons with dissimilar others increase with the intensity, diversity, and frequency of social contacts.50 Political scientists have similarly demonstrated how social contexts and relationships shape preferences and activate latent opinions. For example, low-income Americans are more likely to identify as “have-nots” in more unequal places, suggesting that local income inequality may trigger upward social comparisons with better-off others.51 Therefore, first we will examine trends in exposure to cross-class contact, structured by geographic segregation, labor market segmentation, and social affinity. We trace class segregation across time and place and demonstrate that geographic cross-class exposure is associated with more accurate status perceptions and more liberal policy preferences in the real world outside of our experiments. We will also explore factors beyond class integration, like the media environment, which structure exposure to class contrasts. Exposure to economic difference, whether in the neighborhood, in the workplace, or through the media, is shaped heavily by the intersections between class, race,

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and gender. We will show how these forces combine to limit Americans’ exposure to upward contrasts with the wealthy. Increasing Preference for Downward Comparison Though contact and exposure matter, they are not the only factors that govern cross-class comparison.52 An individual’s experience of social comparison in the real world varies with a group’s relative standing to other groups,53 the salience and visibility of symbolic boundaries,54 and the motivating factors for social comparison.55 Importantly, as we have already alluded to several times, most individuals prefer to avoid upward comparison,56 often favoring more comfortable comparisons with others of a similar social station or with those slightly worse off. In fact, the tendency to avoid upward comparison (the very experience that we expect to increase demand for redistributive spending) may be directly related to rising inequality. While upward comparisons are uncomfortable, downward comparisons can give people a boost in terms of how they perceive their own status. Astute observers of the human condition from Woolf to King to modern social scientists have pointed to that fact. In particular, scholars of social comparison like psychologist Susan Fiske have hypothesized that individuals who perceive their status as falling (for example, as a result of rising inequality) may be more likely to make ego-boosting downward social comparisons, focusing on those who are worse off as a way to counter inequality’s threat to self-esteem.57 This is precisely what we find: Americans avoid thinking about cross-class comparison whenever they can, but economic anxiety makes people even more likely to look away from the rich. In an era of rampant economic anxiety, people prefer to compare themselves to similar others or to the poor, and avoid the sort of upward comparisons that might induce opinion change. All of these findings indicate that whether or not people know factually that the rich are growing richer, they try to refrain from thinking about them in social comparative terms. Thus, politics is insulated from inequality. Comparison, Status Perception, and Political Efficacy Even when these contextual forces align, and people do make social comparisons with the wealthy, the potential for political action in support of redistribution faces an additional hurdle. Upward comparisons may be disempowering, and so even as the experience alters opinion, it may suppress its expression.

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Political observers and scholars often point out that the low-status and marginalized citizens who would benefit most from political change are less likely to participate in civic affairs than their more advantaged counterparts.58 It is clear after decades of political behavior research that income, education, and other markers of status are strongly and reliably correlated with several forms of political participation, as well as with individuals’ sense of their own capacity for participation.59 The lower a person’s status, the less likely they are to participate. But it is not clear what role individuals’ status perceptions play in this process. Income inequality itself appears to affect participation by concentrating resources and power at the top of the distribution, and thereby creating a public sphere in which the issues debated are not of interest to the less advantaged in society.60 This dynamic is compounded by interest groups that disproportionately represent the wealthy and parties that cater to them.61 Furthermore, people with more education and income simply have more of the time, resources, and skills that make political participation easier and more effective.62 Even without social comparison and status perceptions, these factors could explain the relationship between socioeconomic status and political engagement. But there is reason to expect that social comparison itself may affect people’s attitudes about political participation by changing status perceptions. Here, the social psychological literature can again inform our expectations. As we have discussed, social comparisons are profoundly important to individuals’ sense of self.63 People use downward comparisons to protect and boost self-concept, while upward comparisons threaten self-appraisals. On top of this, social comparison becomes particularly important when it comes to assessing capabilities. As famed psychologist Albert Bandura wrote in a review of the research on this subject, “Most activities do not provide objective standards for assessing ability. People must, therefore, assess their capabilities in relation to the attainments of others. The people with whom individuals compare themselves influence how they judge their ability.”64 One of the studies Bandura cited in drawing this conclusion was an experiment he had conducted in which he randomly assigned subjects to feel they were performing progressively better, or progressively worse than peers on an experimental task. Those subjects who gained on the reference group, ultimately being led to believe that they outperformed their peers, expressed a greater sense of their capacity to accomplish the task well and actually performed better on future trials.65 Whether this sort of pattern, quite clear for achievement-related tasks like test taking, extends to the more nebulous

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world of socioeconomic status and politics is unclear. We test it directly and find that indeed, individuals who compare upward, and perceive their status as lower, feel less politically capable, even holding resources and systemic conditions constant. The Central Role of Race and Gender This is a story about the cross-class comparisons people in America make (or do not make). But like the broader story about class in America, it cannot be told without race and gender. These social categories do not simply make a cameo in our story, entering in for a single scene or chapter late in the book. Rather, because race and gender are the main social cleavages Americans use to define the social world, we will show that they matter for every aspect of the relationship between social comparison and response to economic inequality, every phenomenon we explore. Race and gender determine who comes to mind when people think of the economic other, fleshing out the images we conjure of the rich and the poor. In the real world, race and gender determine who compares with whom. They structure patterns of contact in daily life through neighborhood, school, occupational and other forms of stratification; they increase the feelings of anxiety and threat that drive people to avoid upward comparison. When we compare, race and gender determine whether people focus on difference or similarity with the economic other. People assume similarity when they see someone from their in-group,66 so racial and gender differences can exacerbate feelings of social contrast, while racial and gender similarity can make social distances feel smaller. Like Woolf and King point out, people can seek out racial and gender comparisons to satisfy the drum major instinct and feel powerful when cross-class comparison leaves them vulnerable. Finally, in some ways we will see that race and gender make some Americans more or less vulnerable to the effects of social comparison. These dynamics point to another reason to bring a social comparative frame into the study of politics and inequality: though inequality powerfully intersects with race and gender, statistical information about economic inequality is often presented in ways that hold these social group identities constant, looking at class patterns in isolation. While statistical control is certainly necessary for many research purposes, this is a consequential omission if we want to understand how Americans themselves think about inequality. Previous research finds that our political attitudes are heavily shaped by our social group memberships and how we view our own groups relative to others.67 Studies of public opinion and inequality—in particular those that fall into the

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information deficit perspective, looking at the impact of factual knowledge about the income distribution—separate class from race and gender in a way that turns a blind eye to what we know about how Americans think about economic difference. In contrast, we pay particular attention to the role of race and gender throughout this book, testing and demonstrating the specific ways through which they structure Americans’ responses to economic inequality. This approach also runs counter to prevailing political narratives that often pit identity politics, particularly issues concerning race and gender, against class politics and economic divides. In the fallout of the 2016 election, debates of this nature swarmed the airwaves and editorial pages—did class attitudes or racial attitudes drive the result? Did gender matter, or was it just the economy? We demonstrate that these forces cannot so easily be separated. When Americans imagine the economic other they see race and class too; when they think about their own status, income and identity blend to paint the picture. Our work brings to light several specific mechanisms through which this blending occurs. Theoretical Model: The Social Perception of Inequality We bring all of these phenomena together in figure 2.3, which presents our theoretical model, with the social perception of inequality at its center. We theorize that perceptions of and reactions to inequality are produced not just from absolute resources (like income), broad trends in inequality, or even objective relative status (position relative to others captured by income, wealth, or other objective markers), but from perceived status (one’s perceived position relative to others). These status perceptions arise in large part from which comparisons people make, and how often they think in social contrast–based terms. We argue that resolving long-standing puzzles about the politics of inequality requires attention to the perception of relative status and its basis in social experience. Moving from left to right in figure 2.3, we begin with inequality itself, which determines individuals’ objective status relative to others, but also produces a surge of economic anxiety and an undertow of class segregation. These factors structure who compares with whom, which alters how status is perceived and, in turn, political attitudes and demands the American people place on government.68 In the ways we have discussed, the context and experience of race and gender influence each element of the figure, from the experience of economic inequality and objective status, to the availability, preference for, and reaction to comparisons with the economic other.

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F i g u r e 2 . 3 . The Social Perception of Inequality

In short, to compare is human, but a lot goes into governing which comparisons we make. The political economy, race and gender, and individual psychology combine to direct our constantly comparing minds up, down, or even to similar others. People may think in terms of “us and them” but there are lots of “thems” from which to choose. We take this as a premise from which to build several empirical questions: When do we compare? With whom? How do we react? Finally, how do those responses determine the response to growing inequality?

I n s u l at e d , N ot I m m u n e This book’s central argument is that Americans are responsive to cross-class comparison, but are increasingly sheltered from this sort of thinking by growing geographic segregation and economic anxiety. Race and gender are central to this process, contributing to the public images they conjure when they think of the economic other, and structuring whether Americans compare themselves to the rich or poor. We proceed in three parts, in turn investigating how Americans construct and respond to the economic other, identifying the effects of social comparison on status perceptions and preferences, and examining the specific forces that insulate American politics from the effects of social comparison. Taken as a whole, the evidence in this book points to a swelling social blindness to the growth in inequality in America. Countervailing forces prevent Americans from thinking about cross-class differences, especially when

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it comes to gaps between themselves and other Americans at the top of the hierarchy. Even when these increasingly rare opportunities do occur, they engender a sense of powerlessness, pushing Americans away from political action even as their desire for government action grows. In 2016, President Obama wrote to journalist David Remnick: Ray Charles’s version of “America the Beautiful” will always be in my view the most patriotic piece of music ever performed—because it captures the fullness of the American experience, the view from the bottom as well as the top, the good and the bad, and the possibility of synthesis, reconciliation, transcendence.69 What we document in this book is the simple fact that in the lives and minds of everyday Americans, this kind of synthesis is rare. Some have the view from the bottom, others from the top; some look up, but more prefer to look down or keep their eyes fixed straight ahead. When Americans do think in terms of cross-class comparison, stereotypes about the economic other fill in the spaces left blank by experience. “Synthesis, reconciliation, and transcendence” are increasingly out of reach. And so, despite responsiveness at the individual level to inequality when it is framed in social terms, American public opinion has responded anemically to the great rise in inequality because of countervailing, contextual forces like economic segregation, anxiety, and racial and gender divides. Americans are far from immune to inequality, but the social context hides it from view.

Chapter 3

Revealing the Social Mind There is no single face in nature, because every eye that looks upon it, sees it from its own angle. So every man’s spice-box seasons his own food. Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road, 1942

In framing our inquiry around the social perception of inequality, we raise a new set of empirical questions, asking which social comparisons Americans draw upon to make sense of their place in the socioeconomic hierarchy, how Americans respond when they are induced to think about inequality in terms of cross-class comparisons, and how their environments shape their comparison targets. Answering these questions requires an analytical shift; instead of looking at people’s absolute resources and statistical reasoning, we must investigate their social perception and relative status. Such a shift creates serious methodological challenges for a researcher. With observational data collected in large surveys, it is nearly impossible to untangle the social comparisons people make from their own status and social context. For example, do the wealthy perceive their status as higher because of the resources they possess or because they have a lot of bronze-medal experiences, in which they look down and feel high up? The methodological knot gets even more tangled when we bring in political attitudes: let’s say we found that middle-class people living in more economically integrated communities reported higher support for social welfare programs; it might be because cross-class contact changes attitudes, but it could also be that people predisposed to support government programs also chose to live in more integrated communities. In short, with the kind of data social scientists commonly use to examine public opinion, it is hard to say whether social comparison itself matters. To paraphrase Zora Neale Hurston, every eye that looks upon the economic other (or inward at the self) sees it from its own angle, and it is very

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difficult to know whether the comparison or the other contents of a person’s spice-box produce any patterns we observe in the world. We resolve these challenges primarily through experiments in which we randomly assign subjects in large nationally representative samples to imagine different cross-class conversations. Some subjects are primed to make upward comparisons, while others are primed to make downward comparisons. Randomization holds potential confounders, including resources, other individual traits, and contextual factors, constant across experimental groups, allowing us to identify the effect of the social comparison in isolation and observe how perceptions of status change even as resources remain constant. Like a drug trial where the only thing that differs between two groups of patients is whether they receive the medication or not, in our experiments, the only factor that varies systematically is the nature of the social comparison we ask them to make. Within these experiments, we also collect and leverage qualitative data. Across our national samples, people write about their imagined conversations and partners, yielding a rich, large-sample, qualitative dataset, which we use to examine how Americans think about the rich and poor, and how they view themselves in relation to these economic others. Finally, throughout the book, we augment our experimental tests and qualitative interpretations with data from several large-scale surveys of the American public. In this chapter, we lay out the central methodological challenges and detail each of our strategies for investigating the responses and level of exposure to cross-class social comparison.

T h e C h a l l e n g e s o f S t u d y i n g S o c i a l C o m pa r i s o n It can be difficult to measure and observe social comparisons, because they are often so automatic that people may not be aware that they have made them. As psychologists Daniel Gilbert, R. Brian Geisler, and Kathryn Morris have noted in their seminal study of why and when people make social comparisons, they are often “spontaneous, effortless, and unintentional” reactions that are “so natural and easy that people make them even when they don’t really want to.”1 But even if we find a way to detect and measure social comparative thinking, it is still hard to separate it from the markers of status (like education and income), from social context, and from psychological states. As we explained earlier, whether people look up, down, or around to similar others is influenced by all of these factors: their own standing relative to others, the frames of reference available within their environments and social networks,

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and personal psychological states such as uncertainty and anxiety. As a result, it is difficult to know whether we can attribute any outcomes we observe to social comparison or to the things that foster it. Of course, education, context, anxiety, and the like are also correlated with what people know about inequality and with their ideological commitments. So how are we to know whether political attitudes about redistribution are truly affected by the social comparisons people make, or just by another factor associated with those comparisons? This thorny identification problem—the challenge of teasing out the effect of a social comparison from other characteristics and phenomena with which it covaries—is perhaps one reason for the lack of attention to social comparison in the political research.

Identifying the Effect of Social C o m pa r i s o n t h r o u g h E x p e r i m e n t s Researchers across the social sciences who are interested in social comparison look for clever ways to separate it from status, resources, context, and psychological states. One method is to focus on what happens when social comparisons are thrust upon people by some as-if-random change in their environment. Researchers look for a natural experiment, where exposure to social comparison is produced by some external factor that is itself unrelated to the outcome they are studying, looking for ways in which nature approximates random assignment. Some of the studies we have already mentioned take this approach; for instance, when researchers look at the type of plane people board, that is taken as a natural experiment. This kind of study has led to significant advances in understanding of social comparison, but it requires researchers to assume that the variation in context (e.g., plane type) is truly random, and that social comparison is the only important experience that changes with that variation (for example, a plane’s boarding type only changed levels of social comparison, not other drivers of anger). If either of these assumptions is violated, the conclusions are called into question. Experimental Design True experiments, conducted in the field, a laboratory, or survey environment, can identify the causal effect of social comparison by randomly assigning participants to experience a social comparison and then looking at what

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happens next. This method predominates in studies of social comparison in psychology and behavioral economics, but is only beginning to be applied in related studies of public opinion and politics.2 We take this experimental approach. We rely primarily on a survey experimental method we base on an intervention, first developed by social psychologists. Throughout the book, we will present experiments in which we induce people to imagine and then contrast themselves with prototypical members of different social classes—to think in terms of cross-class social comparison. Previous studies have shown that experimentally induced social comparison alters how people perceive their own status, holding research participants’ education, resources, context, knowledge, and ideology constant across experimental conditions. Other studies have used similar interventions in experiments with undergraduates and convenience samples to examine how subjective status perception affects charitable giving, empathy, unethical behavior, and perceptions of social mobility.3 We bring this method to the study of public opinion by conducting our experiments within surveys of large, nationally representative samples of Americans, and by examining a host of political outcomes. In these experimental studies, we randomly assign subjects with equal probability to one of three conditions: (1) downward comparison, (2) upward comparison, and (3) control. Subjects assigned to one of the two comparison conditions are first shown an image of a ladder and instructed to think of the ladder “as representing where people stand in the United States.” This prompt is based on the MacArthur Scale of Subjective Social Status, a visual scale designed to capture a sense of social status that can be applied across populations.4 Subjects assigned to the comparison conditions are then presented with the following vignette in which they are randomly assigned to contrast themselves with either very high or very low-status individuals: Think of the people in the United States who are the (worst/best) off— those who have the (least/most) money, (least/most) education, and the (least/most) respected jobs. In particular, we’d like you to think about how you are different from these people in terms of your own income, educational history, and job status. To encourage social comparison, subjects in the comparison conditions are then asked to imagine a social interaction with one of the people they

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thought about and to write a few sentences describing their feelings about the interaction: Now imagine yourself in a getting acquainted interaction with one of the people you just thought about from the ladder on the previous screen. Think about how the differences between you might impact what you would talk about, how the interaction is likely to go, and what you and the other person might say to each other. How comfortable do you think you would have felt in the interaction you have imagined? Please write 1–5 sentences describing your feelings about the interaction you have imagined. Following this vignette and free-writing exercise, subjects are asked to rank themselves relative to these people at the very top or bottom of the ladder: Where would you place yourself on this ladder relative to these people at the very (bottom/top)? Please select a number on a grid below representing rungs of the ladder with 10 representing the top rung and 1 representing the bottom rung. This social comparison intervention draws people’s attention to the social hierarchy by asking them to imagine an interaction with either an advantaged or disadvantaged other. Importantly, these experiments provide no factual information to participants. Instead, the unwieldy construct of inequality is personalized. By asking people to consider inequality in terms of their own social distance from others at the bottom or the top of the socioeconomic hierarchy, we frame inequality as interpersonal difference, and in particular, we frame this difference in terms of the subject’s own relative status.5 We conducted several versions of this experiment with large samples of Americans. Two of these studies were conducted with nationally representative samples of Americans, with around one thousand participants in each study; we rely on those two experiments when we make claims in the book about what happens to Americans’ status perceptions, opinions, and feelings of political empowerment when they compare upward or downward. We present additional replications of the core experiment conducted with opt-in samples of American adults to dig more deeply into some of the questions raised by our main studies.6

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Getting Inside the Social Mind: Listening and Interpreting In these experiments, we measure status perceptions and political attitudes through the sort of survey questions commonly used in public opinion polling. Through these questions, we will uncover the causal effects of upward and downward social comparison. But we do not stop our investigation with survey items; our research questions extend beyond patterns in stated attitudes to the nature of cross-class comparison in the American imagination: what do Americans think about when their attentions are drawn to the highest and lowest rungs of the ladder? Whom do people picture when they think of the rich or the poor? What kinds of emotional reactions do people have to particular social comparisons? And how do people connect social comparisons to politics in their own thinking? For these types of questions, we need a way to tap into our study participants’ social imaginations. Scholars asking these sorts of research questions often turn to a methodology that is very different from the survey and experimental work we have discussed so far. Throughout the literature, in-depth interviews and rich ethnographic studies shed light on what political scientist Katherine Cramer calls the “reasoning processes people use to make sense of politics.”7 Scholars working in this tradition of research have repeatedly pushed social science fields beyond existing theory. Qualitative inquiry facilitates discovery and new insight by attending to the way people connect and categorize the social and political world, rather than imposing constructs upon them with uniform survey questions. For example, in contrast to a survey, an in-depth interview is flexible, creating important opportunities to interrogate public opinion in ways not initially foreseen by the researcher. But like all methodological approaches, qualitative methods involve tradeoffs. In particular, much of what we know about social comparison and political attitude formation from such studies is heavily context dependent, leaving questions about the generalizability of the findings. Americans’ Written Reactions to Cross-Class Comparison We take a different approach, studying the descriptions of imagined crossclass interactions written by Americans in our nationally representative samples. As we laid out above, following the experimental manipulation and before our post-treatment questions, we asked participants to write about their impressions of the poor or the wealthy and what they imagine a social

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interaction with such a person might be like. This free-writing exercise produced a rich qualitative dataset that provides insight into how Americans from all across the nation and all walks of life react to cross-class social comparison. We present these data in particular in chapters 4 and 5, analyzing the responses of Americans in two separate nationally representative samples.8 Those assigned to our two treatment conditions, downward comparison and upward comparison, were asked to do the free-writing exercise. Throughout the book, when we reference these responses, we focus on the open-ended reflections of the 1320 people assigned to one of these two groups.9 In our survey experiments, we offer a minimal prompt, asking only that people contrast themselves with someone at the top or bottom of the ladder. We let people fill in the details. In their written responses to the prompt, we are able to hear Americans describe, in their own words, who they imagine, what concerns or beliefs come to mind, and how they feel about the comparison. In taking this approach, we aim to follow qualitative scholars like sociologist Michèle Lamont, who, in her investigation of American workingclass men’s “mental mappings” of the socioeconomic hierarchy, does not direct her interviewees’ attention to a particular social group or person when asking them simply about “people above” or “people below.”10 We present responses from Americans from all walks of life. We were not limited to a particular place, such as rural Wisconsin, or to a particular social group, such as working-class men. This method involves its own tradeoffs. Our studies forego the contextual richness of ethnography and the chance to probe people’s responses over longer time spans, but they offer benefits in terms of what we can learn about social comparison in the American political imagination, even beyond the representativeness and size of the sample. Our studies are conducted online, and so they create a private, anonymous space for people to react to socioeconomic difference. In some ways, this is a closer approximation of the naturalistic experience of social comparison, which is often done in the privacy of a person’s own mind, and often not discussed with others. Though we ask people to write down their thoughts, the writer is removed from the eventual reader. In this way, our approach is somewhat akin to the letter-writing technique employed by therapists in which patients write letters to a person with whom they have a grievance, with no plans to send the letter. In contrast to a face-to-face interaction, the patient can express thoughts and emotions with less concern for judgment, unconstrained by social norms against offending or upsetting the imagined recipient.11 Our studies often worked in this way; people had plenty to say when they were prompted to imagine conversations

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with the economic other. Many appeared to let their guards down, revealing a profound sense of vulnerability, insecurity, or disdain, often expressing grievances against the imagined other. Analyzing and Reporting Qualitative Data from Large-Scale Experiments Such authenticity and richness are often sacrificed in experimental research, which employs tight control over the subjects’ experiences and responses in order to identify causal relationships. We believe such sacrifice is not always necessary. Experimental researchers often ask subjects to engage in writing exercises to strengthen manipulations, but the resulting qualitative data are frequently left on the cutting room floor unanalyzed, or perhaps featured sparingly in books and articles to “add color” to reports of quantitative results. What is lost is an opportunity to listen to the thinking of the people who participate in the experiments. To investigate systematically the large-scale data gleaned from study participants’ written remarks, we used a mix of “open” and “focused” coding.12 That is, we read the written responses to inductively discover patterns and themes (open coding), but also looked for topics that we had previously identified as of particular interest (focused coding). We did our open coding separately, writing brief memos to each other and discussing the categories that emerged for each of us, which we then used to refine and expand our initial coding scheme. For example, we knew we wanted to code for characteristics of the social comparison, like whether respondents talked about difference or similarity. But it was only after reading through the free writes that other categories emerged, such as whether the subject actively attempted to find common ground, with language like “all people are the same.”13 In chapters 4 and 5, we discuss the main patterns and themes we uncovered, and we quote extensively from the data, letting Americans speak for themselves. We use pseudonyms for our study participants, and take advantage of the socioeconomic and demographic variables collected in previous waves of the panels to provide additional context to their reflections. We report the responses as people wrote them, making minor edits in brackets only when necessary to clarify the meaning of the quote. We also leverage our coded dataset to investigate whether some reactions were more prevalent among subsets of respondents in different demographic groups or experimental conditions. For example, we look at the rate with which people mention personal responsibility, noting that it is more common among Republicans than Democrats and more common among people in our

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downward comparison condition than our upward comparison condition. For interested readers, we have included a table summarizing the rates of various response categories discussed in the book in the appendix and the results of statistical tests supporting statements about group differences in endnotes. We include the rates of various responses because we think readers might be curious about them, but we also want to underscore that the writing exercise was not explicitly designed to uncover raw rates of attitudes in the American public. It is likely that the attitudes we find in some people’s responses are even more prevalent in public. Respondents had a great deal of flexibility in this writing activity. The rates of any one attitude will be lower than what we might uncover with survey-based methods designed to get specifically at that particular attitude. For example, a participant may feel resentment toward the rich (a theme we explore), but write only about general discomfort with class comparisons.14 In sum, readers should interpret the frequencies reported as suggestive, but not as a definitive word on the prevalence of class attitudes. Instead, the value of Americans’ written descriptions of cross-class comparison lies in their potential to show us how class attitudes are combined, qualified, and explained by those who hold them, and in the unexpected themes that emerge. Our approach then is to bring an “ethnographic sensibility” to Americans’ written responses. Political scientist Edward Schatz describes such a sensibility as “an approach that cares—with the possible emotional engagement that implies—to glean the meanings that the people under study attribute to their social and political reality.”15 In bringing this sensibility to large-scale experimental research about public opinion we aim to follow scholars like Katherine Cramer, who argues that if we want “to explain why people express the opinions that they do, we need to examine and describe how they perceive the world” rather than simply tallying up their responses to predetermined survey questions.16 We need to be able to look for the coherence and associations in thought, as well as the contradictions and omissions in expression. Additional Experiments and Analyses Another tradeoff we face in relying primarily on large-scale experimental data is that we are unable to follow up with additional questions that could help clarify and improve our interpretations, like we might do in an interview setting. In some cases, this means that we have to stop at the water’s edge, unable to explore particular currents of thought. For example, some people reference knowing someone at the bottom of the ladder. We are rarely told, however,

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where they met, or how frequently they encounter or think about such a person in their daily lives. Nor do we always know from written responses what race or gender people imagine when thinking of the economic other. With these limitations in mind, throughout the book we supplement our study participants’ reflections with other experimental studies or additional public opinion and demographic data to fill in some these gaps. Through these additional analyses and experiments, we will demonstrate, for example, how the images of the rich and poor are racialized and gendered; that, though cross-class contact is on the decline as a whole, many more Americans report contact with the poor than with the rich; and that cross-class contact in the real world appears to work much like it does in our experiments. Finally, through additional experiments we will demonstrate just how resistant Americans are to thinking about cross-class comparison, and how the resistance to comparing upward increases when we induce feelings of economic anxiety. We use these additional analyses and experiments as needed, when we expect that respondents are holding back in their descriptions to comply with social desirability norms, when we wish to probe patterns suggested by the written responses, and when we want to see whether the world beyond the experimental context matches up with what our studies show.

C o m b i n i n g I n t e r p r e ta t i v e a n d E x p e r i m e n ta l R e s e a r c h In sum, by randomly assigning Americans to experience different cross-class social comparisons, we uncover the causal connection between thinking about inequality in this interpersonal manner and Americans’ status perceptions and political attitudes. The large number of written descriptions of imagined interactions produced within our survey experiments also gives us the opportunity to listen to how a nationally representative sample of Americans thinks about the economic other, social comparison, and the social world, and to come close to observing their private thinking rather than their public discussions of the subject. In this book, we aim to listen carefully to what they tell us. Our approach draws together strengths of interpretative qualitative research (investigation of people’s own perceptions), experimental research (valid causal inferences), and survey research (generalizability to the population) to investigate the puzzling American response to inequality. Taken together, these data show us that thinking about the difference between the self and the economic other is a powerful and politically important experience.

Chapter 4

The Disadvantaged Other Why should they seek our gaze? What would they have to say to us? “We”—this “we” is everyone who has never experienced anything like what they went through—don’t understand. We don’t get it. We truly can’t imagine what it was like. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 20031

In the introduction to her seminal book on the public image of welfare recipients, political scientist Ange-Marie Hancock presents a description from the Congressional Record of a woman named Bertha Bridges. The description contains details that, as Hancock demonstrates throughout the book, trigger stereotypes about race, gender, and the poor: Bertha’s son has behavioral issues at school; she is unemployed; she receives welfare benefits. Hancock then asks readers to close their eyes and picture Bertha, betting on her readers to demonstrate for themselves the universality of the public identity of a welfare recipient evoked by the description.2 Hancock’s narrative device is like a powerful but disheartening version of the classic children’s party trick in which kids are asked to think of a country that starts with the letter D and an animal that starts with E. Youngsters are delighted when the entertainer “reads their minds,” telling them they are all thinking of an elephant in Denmark. Just as most small children can think of only one animal that begins with E, many Americans summon a single picture of the poor. And as Hancock demonstrates, this racialized and gendered image of an unemployed, lazy person on the public dole “acts as an interpretive filter” for political discourse and opinion formation.3 Several studies have shown that individuals often draw upon their attitudes toward salient groups when forming their policy preferences.4 In particular, ideas about poverty affect attitudes about social programs and inequality. And so, we begin our exploration of cross-class comparison and American politics by asking what image of the poor Americans conjure today.

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Public Opinion about the Poor In 1821, the Massachusetts state legislature convened a select committee to investigate the “increase in pauper burden” on the Commonwealth.5 The Quincy Report, as it was called, made clear that the poor would remain divided into the two classes that characterized the Elizabethan poor laws adopted by the American colonies. First were the “impotent poor . . . wholly incapable of work, through old age, infancy, sickness or corporeal debility.” They were distinguished from the “able poor . . . capable of work, of some nature, or other; but differing in the degree of their capacity, and in the kind of work, of which they are capable.” The report further explained that these “able poor” were poor mainly because of their own moral failings, recommending, for example, that government deny relief to any pauper “who is habitually intemperate in the use of ardent spirits, unless such person be confined in some Workhouse or House of Correction.” The difficulty in crafting a public response to poverty, the committee noted, would be to provide charity and care to the first group, without encouraging “idleness” and “intemperance” among the second.6 This distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor continues to animate public discourse, and racism, tightly intertwined with the dichotomy, makes American attitudes about poverty particularly harsh and punitive. Take, as one of many examples, the fact that cash assistance to the poor received broad support when it allowed widowed white women to stay at home with their children, but public scorn when black women were begrudgingly given their welfare rights.7 Media coverage of poverty became more negative in the late 1960s and 1970s, focusing on the modern version of the “able poor”—welfare “cheats and chiselers”—and the dysfunctions of government. African Americans were disproportionately featured in these negative stories and excluded from discussions of the deserving poor.8 As political scientist Martin Gilens has shown, these racialized media narratives of poverty reinforce biases about African Americans’ work ethic and help drive white Americans’ opposition to welfare.9 It appears that the 1996 welfare reform act, which added work requirements and other limits and conditions, has done little to reduce these stereotypes or increase the public’s willingness to invest in antipoverty programs.10 Yet there are also studies suggesting that the extent of disgust and disdain for the poor is overstated. Anti-poverty programs that are viewed as fostering self-reliance, for example, receive support among white Americans despite

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racialized views of poverty.11 The idea that Americans are actually quite sympathetic and caring toward the poor was explicitly noted even back in 1821 in the Quincy Report itself, which cautioned that the local officials in charge of pauper laws would have difficulty holding firm to the line between the deserving and undeserving poor because they would be “guided by sentiments of pity and compassion.”12 Some survey data from the American National Election Studies (ANES) suggest something similar. The ANES regularly includes “feeling thermometer” questions that ask respondents to rate social groups on a scale that ranges from 0 (coolest) to 100 (warmest), where a rating of 50 means the respondent doesn’t “feel particularly warm or cold.” As shown in figure 4.1, Americans report fairly warm evaluations of “poor people.” Though these data suggest that opinions toward the poor have not changed much over the last forty years, other public opinion data suggest that, if anything, Americans have become more generous. In a 1985 Los Angeles Times poll of American attitudes toward poverty, only 50 percent of those surveyed agreed that poor people are hard-working. When the LA Times conducted the survey again in 2016, they found that number had jumped to 65 percent; there was a similarly sized 14 percentage point jump in the share of Americans who agreed that the poor have a hard time finding work.13 In another recent study of class attitudes, political scientist Spencer Piston finds that many Americans say they do feel sympathy toward the poor when asked

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F i g u r e 4 . 1 . Feeling Thermometer Ratings for “Poor People,” 1972–2016 Source: ANES Cumulative File, 1948–2016.

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directly. Relying on closed-ended survey questions, which explicitly ask participants about their levels of various attitudes, Piston concludes that most Americans “believe poor people have less than they deserve and report feelings of compassion for them.”14 So, which is it? When thinking about those at the bottom of the ladder do Americans conjure up images of “cheats and chiselers”? Or are they more charitable toward the poor, moved by “sentiments of pity and compassion”? Recent studies, like Piston’s, suggest that more Americans fall into the latter camp. Though we see these sentiments to some extent in our study too, it is not all we find. Because we allow people to speak freely for themselves in their open-ended responses, we observe the ways that people qualify and combine their opinions. And these responses call broad statements about American sympathy for the poor into question. Although some Americans show concern for the poor, we also find that they make that care contingent, frequently adding qualifying remarks about a narrow group of the poor they actually find deserving, and reserving empathy and support for those perceived to be working hard to escape poverty. While these same respondents might, for instance, express high sympathy for the poor in a closed-ended survey question, our qualitative investigation suggests that this goodwill has important limits.

The American Dream I don’t particularly like lazy When making downward comparisons, very few—less than 2 percent—of the Americans in our study brought up social causes or solutions to poverty; over five times as many wrote that it is the responsibility of individuals to help themselves.15 Such faith in the self-reliant citizen is deeply ingrained within American political culture,16 and attributions of blame and deservingness— often linked to values of hard work and judgments about individual initiative— remain central to Americans’ evaluations of the welfare state.17 Hard work and personal responsibility play into Americans’ ideas about the economic other, rich or poor. In chapter 5, we will explore how these deepseated beliefs emerged among the Americans who imagined talking with the rich, often manifesting in admissions of personal failure and expressions of admiration for the hard-working, advantaged other. But in the complex story Americans tell about the rich, ideas about work and personal responsibility are merely one component. In contrast, they are the core of American views of the poor. The open-ended responses are telling on this front: Americans were

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significantly more likely to reference personal responsibility, work ethic, and deservingness if they were primed to think about the least advantaged.18 In the American imagination, as explained by Donna in rural New Mexico, Lack of money and education usually is because of poor life choices. Some people got specific about what they felt these poor life choices were, offering vivid portraits of disadvantage and fault. Luke, a white man in Nebraska with a high school diploma and an income just above the state median, told us he pictured single mothers with children. Unemployed men and women. Their children poorly dressed. They all have cell phones and are heavy set. Luke is clearly describing the public image of the welfare recipient Hancock and others have studied, filling in the image with class signals like clothing. The person he imagines does not work, is unmarried, is an unfit parent, but still has the personal luxury of a cell phone. In Luke’s mind, this person’s life choices are to blame. Maurice, an 81-year-old retiree in Arizona with a fixed income of $35 thousand, narrated a full two-sided conversation with his imagined other: hI jOE, how is your job going? you got laid off, I’m sorry. I hope you are not drinking again. No I have been clean for 10 weeks. Good , keep it up. I know a guy that owns a car wash. I could refer you. that would be great. Thanks. Joe never showed for the interview The imagined other—in this case Joe—is poor because he has a drinking problem and, perhaps as a result, does not take advantage of the opportunities Maurice imagines himself generously providing. A job is there for the taking. The helping hand is outstretched. Joe does not take it, and he is the only one at fault. Maurice could have been reading directly from the Quincy Report’s description of the “able poor” in dire circumstances because of the “habitually intemperate . . . use of ardent spirits.” Americans also see the poor as lazy, a word repeated by several people, even those who were more sympathetic. Catherine, a white, Republican woman in Kansas in her fifties who went to college but did not finish, says I think I would be sympathetic and try to help with the situation. However, I would also expect this person to help themselves. I don’t particularly like lazy and therefore would have to believe in the sincerity of the person before I would take the extra step to assist.

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Catherine experiences mild dislike and disapproval when imagining the disadvantaged other, but among other Americans, negative feelings toward the poor were expressed much more strongly. Steve is a 40-year-old, white college graduate who lives with his wife in New York and has a household income nearly three times the state’s median. Asked to imagine a social interaction with someone at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder, he is quick to blame the poor for their own situation: I would feel uncomfortable. I feel guilty that I have more than the people at the bottom, even though it is not my fault. In fact, I actually think that many of them could rise above their situation if they had put in the effort. I tend to think of many of these people as lazy and irresponsible, which makes me a bit angry that I feel bad about having more than them. I also find that I have little in common with these type of people, so it’s difficult to talk to them. Steve blames the poor, not only for their plight, but for his own discomfort. The exercise of social comparison lays bare the great social chasm that separates Steve from the disadvantaged; he has little in common with them, so much so that it is difficult to talk to them. To Steve, who is drawing on the stereotypes he holds of these type of people as lazy and irresponsible, the poor are culpable and distant.19 The world doesn’t owe you anything The comments above are representative of a clear theme in our data: Americans see the poor as causally responsible for their circumstances. But it is conceivable that Americans could still feel that the wider community is morally responsible for addressing that hardship. We found very little evidence to that effect. Instead, drawing on beliefs of the American Dream, many Americans want the poor to solve their own problems. As Kayla, a 23-year-old black college student from North Carolina, put it, Americans want to know how they got into the position they are in. And what they plan on doing to change it. In Wisconsin, Christopher, a white man in his forties with a six-figure income and an associate’s degree, imagines himself telling the disadvantaged other to be responsible for yourself and if you want more then you need to get out there and get it. get off the government payroll. I started with nothing but worked hard myself to get where I am. Christopher was not the only one to reference the government payroll when

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discussing the poor. Often, public benefits are defined in Americans’ minds as income support or welfare, and the public image of the welfare recipient provokes anger. Susan is a white woman in Louisiana, living on a comfortable retirement income nearly four times the state median. She imagines getting acquainted with a poor person, and pictures herself asking Have you really tried to get a job? you know if you would stay away from the casinos you could buy food and school supplies for your children. The world doesn’t owe you anything. If you want to get ahead in this world you need to work. I’m sick of paying for you to sit and wait for the next welfare check to come in.20 Again, Susan’s imagined other is poor through fault (this time gambling), is not providing for imagined children, and is lazy. Susan’s remarks highlight another important theme in the data—she, like many Americans, sees public benefits as zero sum. If the poor receive assistance, Susan is paying for it. This construction of nonworking “takers” is prevalent in political discourse, and it is an important element of the way Americans view the poor. In a Catch 22-like logic that many Americans embrace, the poor are seen as undeserving for the very reason that they take public assistance. Under this logic, poor people are deserving of assistance and care if they do not receive or do not accept public help. But if they take the government assistance that is available, they are cast as takers, and are therefore undeserving. In rural Arkansas, Janice, who lives on an income of $35 thousand, just below the state median, lays out this argument. She begins by empathizing: We would talk about how much harder it is to pay are bills now with the cost rising. The pay is the same but the cost of everything keeps going up. I fell sorry for those that work and make less than me. I don’t know how they make it!! This is one of the most empathetic expressions in our entire study, and one of the only responses to tie poverty to social and economic causes, even implicitly. But then Janice pivots, in the next beat, without transition, writing: Do not fell sorry for those on welfare. They always drive new cars while mine is 14 years old, but I pay my bills. The image of the welfare queen, living high on the public dime, overwhelms Janice’s initial instinct toward empathy, which is grounded in her lived experiences of rising costs and stagnant wages. Janice draws a sharp line between those who work and those on welfare, an imagined distinction that persists despite the work requirements and lifetime limits that have been in place for welfare benefits for over 20 years. That line helps her

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clarify the social distance between herself and the disadvantaged other. Assumed government assistance, and welfare in particular, defines a particular class of the poor, a class from which Janice takes pride in being separate. But it also flips the social order in Janice’s mind. The welfare recipient, driving a new car, is simultaneously resented like the rich for undeserved luxury and despised like the poor for being lazy. Further evidence of the particular disdain many Americans feel toward people who receive public assistance comes from Sharon, participating in our study from her mobile home in rural Texas. She first stakes her claim in a belief in self-reliance: Most people can help themselves by working, and then echoes Janice’s view that those who receive public benefits are undeserving. I do not appreciate the government giving and rewarding bad behavior and giving to those that don’t work and let our veterans do without. Sharon adds a distinction between the deserving disadvantaged (veterans), and the undeserving, again defining those categories with an implicit nod to welfare. Among Americans in our study who are poor themselves, belief in the American Dream, with its principles of self-reliance and mobility, was also strong. We observed several low-income individuals imagining themselves encouraging the imagined conversation partner. Rosario, a Latina woman unemployed in Arizona at 62, has a household income well below the poverty line; she pictured herself giving the imagined other a pep talk, telling them to Think positive, do not let the negative interfere with you climbing up the ladder. Depend only on yourself. All is possible if you seek it! Do not blame your faults on others own it. This kind of unbridled optimism about individual mobility was common among the Americans from all social strata in our study, and was even championed forcefully by those with the least.21 Rhonda, a 79-year-old white high school dropout living on $20 thousand a year in rural Montana, sees a nation of opportunity (using the word opportunity four times in her brief response): There are lots of opportunities for people in debt. It takes time and energy to look for an opportunity. Sometimes we have to accept an opportunity that is not quite what we had imagined. However, we must start somewhere and sometimes another opportunity comes along—it is better to start with something than not at all. Some of these people seem to be encouraging themselves not to waiver in their own faith in the American Dream despite dire circumstances. Marissa is unemployed in rural Minnesota, living in deep poverty, reporting an annual

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income of $5 thousand. She asks the imagined other, Why let your place in life keep you there, why not fight to get yourself higher up the ladder then where you are? It can be done for all of us if we only work at it and are determind. We will see in the next chapter that when Americans think of the rich, belief in the American Dream translates into admiration and advice-seeking. When Americans think of the poor, they sometimes imagine themselves giving advice, usually in the form of admonitions to work harder and think positively. The underlying assumption is that the problems of the poor are solvable through work and determination, as Sylvia, a 67-year-old white woman in Florida, explains: I would show respect to that person. I would try to suggest things that might improve their life. I would stress that hard work and a good education might improve their lot in life I would suggest ways that they might gain assistance for their problems. I would try to boost their confidence that their problems were solvable. Roughly 5 percent of respondents who wrote about an imagined conversation with a disadvantaged other offered advice. Taken together with the emphasis on personal responsibility and work ethic, such paternalistic reactions to an imagined conversation with the poor are broadly consistent with dominant poverty discourse and governance, which views the poor as lacking and needing direction and discipline.22 By the way, I grew up poor myself Many advantaged Americans advocating these principles of personal responsibility and social mobility drew on their own stories of economic advancement. Joy, a divorced 63-year-old from Texas, is enjoying a very comfortable retirement with an income of $80 thousand. Like many others, she attributes poverty to insufficient individual initiative, and offers her own success in moving up the income ladder as evidence: I would ask them what their exact situation is, their family background, their education, their feelings about how they could improve their situation, and tell them I think you can better yourself with effort and perseverance. By the way, I grew up poor myself and 36 years of steady work and saving enabled me to raise myself up by my bootstraps.

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Such responses, highlighting personal success stories, are among the most optimistic and pleasant in tone, capturing an ethos of “can do” spirit. For example, Anne writes from California, where she does not work herself, but lives in a family with a six-figure income. She talks about starting at the bottom, and then leaving college to start a family at 20. She wants the imagined other to know the American Dream is more alive now than ever, and not to believe anything to the contrary: Hi! How are you today? Tell me a bit about yourself. What would you like to see yourself doing? How can I help you? I have been at the bottom, I know with faith, attitude, and the want to be better, along with hard work, really hard work, anyone can accomplish anything, even more so today than 40 years ago when I was leaving school and starting a family (much too early!) . . . One’s circumstance has nothing to do with where one can be or do in the future. We are blessed in our country—we can be who we want to be, do what we want to do, be as successful as we want to be. We need schools and talking heads, politicians, media to stop telling us and our children ‘things are too bad, we’ll never recover, no we can’t,’ and get back to the Rosie the Riveter mantra of ‘YES—WE CAN DO IT!!!’ A few people also emphasized education as the key to their own economic and moral improvement, encouraging the imagined other to do the same, like Robert, a black man in Georgia with a master’s degree and five children, who wrote, I would feel very confortable interacting with that individual. I come from a low position on the ladder and through the use of the military and my education I climb up the ladder. My advise to that individual would be, as long as you’re alive your can rise and You are never to old to go back to school and lastly your life experences are a form of education use that a motivation to rise! These hopeful narratives of personal mobility and education come from Americans with advanced degrees as well as those of lower status, like Valerie, who went back to school to get her high school diploma, and said if they would take advise I would tell them how my belief in god help me and to go back to school and get more education. Valerie is a 60-year-old black woman

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who lives in Delaware just above the poverty line in her mobile home. The story she wants to share with the disadvantaged other is one of hope, faith, and mobility.

D i s c o m f o r t a n d D i s ta n c e It makes you feel nervous because the way things are these days Not all views of American economic opportunity were so rosy. In stark contrast to the stories of mobility and comments about personal responsibility, few Americans referenced the state of the economy or availability of goodpaying jobs when thinking about the plight of the nation’s worst off. There were vague, off-hand remarks, like, How about the US economy? Not good, eh? worrisome times ahead, but very few that tied the imagined other’s situation directly to the economy, unlike the chorus of responses directly attributing the other’s poverty to personal responsibility. Instead, when people brought up the economy in response to our prompt about the poor it was to express the concern about their own circumstances. Thinking about inequality and the economy can provoke a self-referential anxiety, making cross-class comparisons of any sort uncomfortable.23 Thinking about the rich can also be anxiety provoking, and later in the book we will demonstrate experimentally that Americans prefer to avoid cross-class comparison in general, but become especially averse to upward comparisons when they feel anxious. But the idea that looking downward always feels good, illustrated by allegories like that of the bronze medalist, is complicated by class and inequality. Making social comparisons with the poor does elevate perceptions of status, a phenomenon we will delve into later in the book, but it can come with a price, especially for people who are struggling economically. Thinking about the poor can make people worry that they are not far enough away for comfort. For example, Kathy, an out-of-work mother in Texas with two adolescent children, thought of the poor and worried about her own situation: I have homeless friends and I have friends who were homeless -It makes you feel nervous because the way things are these days, any one can be homeless. And recall Janice, in Arkansas, who referenced rising costs, low wages, and her own struggle to make ends meet before becoming indignant about the nice cars she imagined welfare recipients driving. Americans who are themselves working-class and poor expressed strong feelings of economic anxiety:

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I don’t feel comfortable anymore getting aquainted with others. I have been unemployed for years, some medical problems, no money, nothing but watching the TV and seeing how the USA is degrading. -Dean, a 58-year-old white man from Florida with a tenth grade education and an income of $35 thousand I have health problems and only can work a few hours/I live at home/ Life is tough -Todd, a 38-year-old white man from Texas with a high school education and an income of $25 thousand not sure since most of the people I know are struggling just as bad in not more so than I am and I struggle every day. -Dawn, a 52-year-old multiracial woman from rural Nevada with some college education and an income of $35 thousand no jobs out they for people to work and our children cant hardly get a job even when they get out of school -Tamera, a 49-year-old multiracial woman from rural North Carolina with a high school education and an income of $15 thousand It is important to note here that the above comments are the people’s responses, in their entirety, to a prompt asking them what they would say and how they would feel getting acquainted with a person at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. The prompt asked subjects to describe the interaction and consider their own response. But putting these Americans in a situation where they were induced to think about social stratification in an interpersonal way elicited profound anxiety about their own lives and little attention to the other person. It is telling that many of those who felt anxiety in response to the downward comparison prompt expressed no desire for social change, or very rarely, a vague desire for change, as Melissa, a 22-year-old white high school graduate from Virginia, did, writing: all people . . . do what they need to do to survive this bad economy. It is unfair where you have to have a degree to clean houses and take care of children. Melissa has the sense that something about the system is unfair, but she does not blame any particular actor or identify any preferred policy demand. As John, a white retired high school graduate from Ohio whose income

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places him in the state’s bottom quartile, noted, there is a sense among many in our study that Everything is getting to high and people cannot afford it. Someone needs to due something. But for those prompted to think of the poor, the something that should be done and the someone who should do it were undefined. In contrast, we will show in the next chapter that those who expressed anger, anxiety, and resentment when prompted to think about the socioeconomic elite often had a clear target of blame come to mind, whether it was executives on Wall Street or Obamacare. Considering inequality from the standpoint of the poor makes many Americans concerned for their own welfare and generally anxious, but combined with the bedrock beliefs in personal reliance and mobility, it is not clear to many what, if anything, should be done to address it. I try to put distance between us soon as possible As we have seen, the poor make people anxious and angry, and those responses produce a desire for social distance. Several people who imagined the poor expressed this desire. Writes Alex, a man in New York with a high school diploma and a household income just below the state’s median: I imagined homeless people living out on the streets. They smell bad, always looking for a handout. They might be asking money to buy their next bottle of alcohol or drugs. I am worried they might try to Rob me or act crazy and do something psycho in my presence. I don’t trust them. I try to put distance between us soon as possible. Alex’s desire for distance was experienced quite literally, but others attempted to distance themselves socially, focusing on the things that made them different from the poor. Even among the working poor, there can be a feeling of disdain for those with less, and a desire for greater distance. Kaliah, a 36-year-old woman in South Carolina with an income just above $12 thousand and some community college courses, notes, I find it sometimes annoying to communicate with non educated people. I could care less how much income one has and for someone to have any job at all is a plus in my book. I do find it hard to carry o[n] a conversation with someone not as educated as myself. Social psychologists have demonstrated that people commonly rely on downward social comparisons to feel better about themselves, following the drum major instinct, and indeed, as we demonstrate later in the book, the Americans in our studies do have a higher perception of their own status

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when prompted to think of the poor. We will also show that when people feel anxious about the economy, they become more inclined to think about the poor as opposed to the rich, trying to generate the boost that can come from downward comparison. Kaliah’s comment is a good example of the ways in which people experience this perception of status elevated through downward comparison.

E m pa t h y a n d C a r e I am a generally empathetic person The image of the lazy poor, belief in the American Dream, and economic anxiety are all important features of the collective American psyche, and all three drive responses to the poor in our data. But the ethic of care for the poor is also a dominant tenet of many popular religious and political belief systems widely held by Americans. When we opened the written responses, we expected to see this ethic on display alongside disdain and indifference. But when we combed through the scenes and stories, we found relatively little. We coded responses systematically for empathy, which we defined as an effort to understand or see things from the other’s perspective, and for concern about or desire to reduce the suffering of the disadvantaged other. We coded responses generously, including any recognition that the other was suffering or any willingness to help. In fact, several of the responses we have already quoted fall into these categories. Fewer than 2 percent of respondents who wrote about the disadvantaged other expressed empathy, and 9 percent expressed concern about the suffering of the disadvantaged other. This group of Americans includes those who made somewhat ambiguous statements of care or concern, like I would give them a doller and wish them well. Such remarks, as responses to a prompt asking the writer to imagine and describe a conversation in which they got to know the other, could be read as caring, but also could be read as dismissive. This group also includes statements that begin with care but then pivot dramatically, saying things like I don’t particularly like lazy. Those who expressed care most strongly said things like Bridgid in Michigan, who wrote, I may not have a lot to give but I would try to help those that need it. We need to help others when we are able to. The world would be a lot better if we did. The threads of an ethos of Christian charity for the poor are evident in some of these responses. Terry in Florida, for instance, commented that opportunities are all gifts from God. . . . To whom much is given much is

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required. Social status or achievements are nice, but what is in our hearts as that is reflected in our behavior and treatment of others is what makes someone truly “great.” Others acknowledged a conflict with core values about care and their true reactions. These Americans drew on faith and ideology to resist feelings of superiority when imagining talking to a poor person: I tried to talk about something he knew about. It was hard to not talk down to a person, because of differences in education, income etc. As a Christian, I need to be more humble. -Patricia, a 77-year-old white woman from Georgia with a high school education and an income of $35 thousand I am a liberal and I would have done everything I could to relate. I would typically feel that I am lucky that I am not in that place. -Denise, a 66-year-old multiracial woman from California with a college education and an income of $50 thousand Patricia and Denise, like many Americans in our study, are working hard to comply with widely held norms about minimizing difference in social interaction. They are also asserting their beliefs in basic human equality, and adhering to religious and political commitments to care for the poor. But they feel the inequality acutely all the same in this social context; they are lucky not to be in that place at the very bottom of the ladder. And offers of concrete help are absent. The most compassionate responses tended to come from women, to be brief, and to focus on the feelings of the poor person. For example, one 84-year-old widow in Massachusetts merely noted: not educated and not making as much money is sad. A 19-year-old from Oregon offered this platitude: Most likely I would smile and try to find the bright side of their situation so they do not feel lesser as a person. Some of these people, especially white women who were wealthy themselves, talked directly about the struggle they felt between the feeling of elevated status our prompt elicited and social norms of care and empathy. They wrote about the empathy they felt they should experience, rather than the empathy they actually felt. Esther, an upper-class white woman from Illinois with a household income of $150 thousand, wrote: I am a generally empathetic person, so I think that I would have been able to tactfully have a conversation with a person on the bottom rung. However, it would be uncomfortable. As these people demonstrate, although the human mind is wired for empathy,

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and social norms often pull us in that direction, it is also challenging, particularly for those in more advantaged situations.24 My feelings would be determined as to why they are on the lower end But even this is an incomplete story. The statements we placed in the goodwill category were frequently qualified with notes about how unpleasant or undeserved compassion would be. The operative word in expressions of American compassion for the poor is if: help would be offered if they were a good person; sympathy would be felt if they couldn’t have helped why they were having a hard life; attempts would be made to find common ground if they don’t have any preconceived prejudices about people who have more than they do. Across two large representative samples, Americans who are compassionate when primed to think about the worst off make their care contingent on whether the poor have sufficiently demonstrated an intent to turn things around themselves. We have already seen hints of this contingent care in the many remarks about deservingness and personal responsibility. Recall Catherine in Kansas, who does not particularly like lazy. She began her response writing that she would be sympathetic and try to help with the situation, and then proceeded to walk back her offer of sympathy and help, talking instead about how the other person would likely not deserve it. In this way, there is some ambivalence, not about the public image of the poor themselves or the causes of poverty, but about how the poor ought to be treated, expressed frequently by members of the white upper-middle class. Jacob, a white 30-year-old with a college degree and six-figure salary, expressed this ambivalence clearly: Honestly this is a very difficult question, because every person is different, and some of the bottom rung people could be very nice and could like things similar to what I do. For instance music, games, movies. There would obviously be differences with vocabulary and interests with everyone. I would probably feel bad about that person’s situation if they were a good person, and want to help. If it was someone who was mean, and didn’t want to improve themselves, then I would be sad and frustrated. Jacob is not alone in communicating an attempt to treat the disadvantaged with basic human dignity, but then making care contingent on the deservingness or character of the other person. Though we saw this kind of conditional

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response with those who thought of the elite as well, conditional goodwill was more common among people who thought about the poor: The interaction would be a little uncomfortable depending on whether the person I am addressing is just a poor person or a criminal. I would probably just talk about something nonpolitical like the weather. I might also ask questions about the other person so as to focus on them not on myself. If they don’t have any preconceived prejudices about people who have more than they do, I might tell them something about myself. -Heidi, a 66-year-old white woman from Indiana with a graduate degree and an income of $85 thousand If the person was on the lower part of the ladder my feelings would be determined as to why they are on the lower end. If they couldn’t have helped why they were having a hard life in order to have a better life I would feel compassion and concern and be a good listener when interacting with them. If they didn’t care about trying to do better and expected handouts and pity I would not feel concern or respect for that person and not want to waste my time to be around them. -Alexis, a 58-year-old white woman from Indiana with a graduate degree and an income of $75 thousand I would feel extremely blessed to have my circumstances, i.e., an advanced degree, prestigious job, comfortable income, many assets, good health, successful children, healthy grandchildren. I would recognize that this individual has worth, although not in a good situation. I would be thinking of ways to help this person, although I might recognize that he/she might not be inclined to take advantage of opportunities presented to improve his/her circumstances. -Rose, a 67-year-old white woman from Arkansas with a graduate degree and an income of $100 thousand Rose’s comment that the disadvantaged other might not be inclined to take advantage of opportunities presented could be read as a gentle condemnation of the other’s poor work ethic. In this way, Rose might be thinking similarly to Maurice in Arizona, who imagined his invented other, Joe, failing to show up for an interview at the carwash. But Rose might also be agreeing with another set of people who note that

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Americans do not like handouts, and do not want help even when struggling. Americans who imagined themselves extending help or kindness to the poor at times envisioned the other refusing help. Wrote one white woman from Michigan: I would feel very bad for this person and would probably make them feel inferior, I would want to give to them and a lot of times they don’t want this. A 76-year-old woman from North Carolina, herself a high school dropout, wrote: I would feel like I was very bless with what I had. The person I talked to had very little and she explain how hard her life was. I ask her if I could help her in any way, and she said no. I would have talked to her about her faith and was she a believer. I told her that I would be praying for her and her family. The imagined other in these responses either does not truly need help, does not deserve it, or refuses assistance. A cynical interpretation is that these Americans are imagining social interactions that absolve themselves of responsibility for the disadvantaged other. After talking to them and listening to them, I started to understand their circumstances At this point, we remind readers again that study participants are responding to imagined conversations, accessing their held beliefs and stereotypes about the poor to create an image of the disadvantaged other. So, for the most part, responses reveal how Americans, who exist in our highly segregated society, think about the disadvantaged other, not what would result from real-world social contact across the classes. And yet, while the great majority of Americans spoke about the poor in the hypothetical, some did draw on their real-life experience interacting across class lines. Among these Americans, we found some unadulterated expressions of compassion, care, and empathy. People who referenced interacting with the poor in their lives emphasized the social importance of finding common ground. For example, Kristen, a 37-year-old woman from Wisconsin, a Democrat with a graduate degree, when prompted to think about the poor, discussed her professional experience: I do this daily as a head start teacher. We discuss our children, the cold Wisconsin weather, and mostly I listen. That seems to be what many need, someone to give them undivided attention. Real-world contact with the poor arose from professional experiences, like Kristen’s, as well as personal history. Levi, a 62-year-old multiracial Jewish man with a professional degree living in rural Vermont, explained the personal source of his empathy for the poor:

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Many of my relatives are at the bottom of the ladder so I have no problem entering into a conversation with them. I was there once myself. Only because I had access to higher educaiotn through scholarships was I able to be where I am now. It is my hope that I can continue to have conversations with them so I can remember where I came from and I can help some of them do better for themselves and their families. Patterns of cross-class interaction with the rich and with the poor are not the same in American society today. As we will explore in the final part of this book, the socioeconomic elite are invisible to most Americans. As a result, many people rely on ambiguous, highly flexible frames of reference when prompted to contrast themselves with the very rich. The poor are also separate, but not to the same extent. Americans living above poverty more frequently confront the poor in the helping professions, like Kristen from Wisconsin: I do this daily as a head start teacher; in their social lives, like Kathy from Texas: I have homeless friends and I have friends who were homeless, and through family networks, like Levi: Many of my relatives are at the bottom of the ladder. Even those who are quite well-off sometimes drew upon their personal experiences volunteering with the poor, as noted by one woman from North Carolina who earns roughly 3.5 times the median household in her state: I have interacted with people at the bottom rung of the ladder thru work over 36 years plus while volunteering at the local soup kitchen. Indeed, Americans were generally more likely to reference personally knowing the economic other if they were assigned to think about the very poor.25 We do not want to exaggerate the extent of this contact. Only a small percent of our subjects discussed it, and as we will explore in greater detail later in the book, the overwhelming experience in America is one of class segregation. Perhaps if there was more real-life contact between Americans living above and below poverty, racialized images of undeserving welfare recipients would not be quite so dominant. There is some indication in our data that contact, when it occurs in the real world, may be able to generate empathy and change opinion. In Utah, Frank, a 67-year-old Mormon white man with some college courses and a six-figure salary, wrote about his own process of growing empathy through cross-class contact. 1. After talking to them and listening to them, I started to understand their circumstances. 2. Some just want to be supported by the government and I see four generations of people on welfare and it angers me.

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3. I am learning to change my thinking because my children are marrying in to people I judge more harshly than myself. Frank’s own family is changing. He is having real experiences with people who are, in some way, different, and though he still holds the common beliefs that the poor are “takers” he is starting to understand, to change [his] thinking. Nevertheless, even in Frank’s experience, contact has to combat entrenched beliefs about poverty, responsibility, and the welfare state. Like Frank’s, most of the empathetic responses in our study were often alloyed with blame and anxiety. One particularly self-aware person, Ellen, in Kentucky, sums up this collective American reaction to the poor: I may have felt a little afraid. I know I would have felt compassion. I would have felt a need to help. I may have felt like they did not try to do better. Ellen notices all of the themes we have discussed. She has an instinct toward compassion and care, but she also experiences anxiety and assumes that the disadvantaged other is responsible for their own plight. Field experimental tests of cross-class contact conducted by political scientist Melissa Sands show that the presence of the disadvantaged other on a street can make well-off people less likely to support redistribution, but political scientist Cecelia Mo and economist Katherine Conn, in a study of the effects of participation in the Teach For America program, in which young people teach in low-income classrooms, show that more prolonged social contact may have the opposite effect, increasing empathy and support for such policy.26 The academic jury is still very much out on this important question, and there are compelling theories on both sides. And so we should be wary of drawing inferences about contact with the poor producing empathy or generosity from the sliver of Americans in our data who mentioned both contact and care. It is certainly likely that these individuals are selecting into professions and social situations that expose them to downward comparison because they are more caring and empathetic in the first place. Additionally, it is important to recognize that neither contact nor comparison is ever solely about class. In particular, when the economic other is a person rather than a statistic, race and gender come into play.

D e s c r i b i n g t h e D i s a d va n ta g e d O t h e r We anticipated that few Americans would write about the demographic characteristics of their imagined conversation partner, particularly because we

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asked them to focus on how the conversation would go and what they would talk about. And indeed, although many of our experimental participants wrote extensively, few described the race or gender of their imagined conversation partner—though many used coded language (e.g., “lazy,” “no work ethic”) to describe those on the bottom of the ladder, which is commonly tied to race in political rhetoric. The people in our studies might be thinking about race and gender—and especially the intersection of the two—but holding back from writing about those categories because of social desirability norms. We wanted to investigate this possibility. As other scholars have documented, and as the Americans in our study suggest through their comments, public perceptions of affluence and poverty are often heavily racialized and gendered.27 Were people imagining the poor other as a woman of color? To test our expectations about race and gender, we designed two other experimental studies to examine the social stereotypes associated with those at the bottom and top of the ladder. As in our main experimental studies, we randomly assigned subjects with equal probability to experience an upward or downward comparison. Then, in the first auxiliary study, we asked subjects to describe their imagined conversation partner by selecting and ordering a set of characteristics: Now, we would like you to think about the person you imagined speaking with, the person at the (top/bottom) of the ladder. Think of describing this person to a friend. You can only tell your friend one thing about this person at a time. Look at the whole list. Drag over the characteristic you would tell your friend about first. What would you tell your friend second? Continue until you have ordered all of the characteristics you think are relevant. Subjects could choose from Male, Female, White, Black, Latino/Hispanic, Asian, Other Race or Ethnicity, Happy, Unhappy, Pleasant, Unpleasant, which were presented in a randomized list. Subjects then selected as many characteristics as they thought were relevant. We then compared the percentage of subjects who selected a particular descriptor in each comparison condition. Figure 4.2 presents the results for how Americans described the racial and gender identities of their imagined conversation partners. Compared to those prompted to look up, people prompted to look down were more likely to select Black (p=.002) and Female (p=.07), and much less likely to select Male (p=.004) and White (p