Nick Hanauer, a Seattle-based entrepreneur (and self-described “zillionaire”) recently wrote a very compelling article for Politico Magazine trying to convince his fellow rich Americans that “the pitchforks are coming." In a nutshell, Hanauer argues that all of the historical evidence clearly indicates that the current trajectory of economic inequality in the United States will eventually lead to revolt (the pitchforks) and that change is needed to boost the middle class, which will ultimately be advantageous for the rich. Pay workers more (e.g., increase the minimum wage to $15 an hour) and they will have more to spend. And their spending will boost the economy. His punch line: It is the middle class that creates jobs, not the rich.
Hanauer makes excellent points. His case is pretty convincing. But I am not an economist or a businessman so I have little that I can intelligently say about the particulars of his argument. However, I am a psychologist and I do know something about human motivation, the psychological variables that drive our behavior. And what I know may help explain why the pitchforks have not yet come and why they may not come for some time.
Americans are not ignorant. They know that the gap between the rich and everyone else is growing. They know that CEO salaries are out of control and that wages for everyone else are standing still, barely moving, or in some cases going down. They know that they have less money to spend, that prices for just about everything are going up. They know that the job market is still very tough and that many people are settling for less than ideal positions or have given up entirely. So where are the pitchforks? Knowledge is power, right? And since people have the knowledge they should be stepping up to take the power, to demand change.
And yet, it seems like business as usual for the most part. Sure, there was Occupy Wall Street and the fast food worker strikes. We see a few pitchforks here and there. But why no mass revolt?
There have not yet been mass revolts because psychological needs are sometimes at odds with and trump financial self-interest. Research in social psychology has long demonstrated the people gain feelings of psychological security by investing in cultural belief systems or worldviews that imbue the world with order and meaning. Cultural worldviews allow us to believe that the world is just and the people ultimately get what they deserve. And these feelings are reassuring. They comfort us and give us the motivation to move forward in life in spite of the many challenges we face.
One prominent worldview in the United States is that people are independent agents who are ultimately responsible for their own financial destinies. America is the place that people go to make it. It is a place where a good idea and hard work creates success. In other parts of the world people are limited by the class they are born into. But not in America. We pull ourselves up by our bootstraps.
In other words, part of the American capitalistic narrative is that rich people deserve to be rich and poor people deserve to be poor because we are responsible for ourselves. The system is fair and we all have a chance to make our own success.
There are, of course, people who do not buy into this worldview, but it remains quite prominent. And perhaps this should not be surprising as it is a very seductive idea and one that likely has contributed to a lot of success in our country.
The problem, however, is that people are motivated to defend this worldview even if it does not fully match reality because the worldview itself (not the potential economic consequences of it) provides psychological security.
Take, for instance, studies that consider the effect of psychological threat on support for one’s cultural worldview. Dozens of experiments indicate that when you remind people of things that have the potential to provoke anxiety (e.g., terrorism, their own mortality), they respond by more adamantly defending their cultural worldviews. For example, in one now classic set of studies led by Dr. Jeff Greenberg of the University of Arizona, research participants were asked to spend a few minutes writing about how they feel about death (a psychologically threatening topic). Participants in a control condition did not write about death. Subsequently, participants read one of two essays. One essay argued in favor of the American worldview that anyone can find financial success if they try hard enough. The other essay challenged this view. It asserted that America unfairly favors the rich. After reading one of these essays, participants were asked to evaluate the essay and the author of the essay. Do they agree with the essay? Do they think the author is intelligent? And so on.
So what did they find? Having people think about death increased positive responses to the essay and author that supported the idea that America is economically fair and anyone can make it here. And it also decreased positive reactions to the essay and author criticizing this worldview. In other words, when people felt threatened, their reaction was to more tightly cling to the idea that our country is fair and that each of us has the power to determine our own financial fate.
Other studies similarly evidence that it is often the people that are most economically or socially disadvantaged that defend the status quo most fervently. How does this work? Shouldn’t these be the people with the pitchforks, the people that would benefit most from economic change? Yes, but it is also these people that may be the most psychologically vulnerable, the most in need of clinging to a worldview that provides some sense of order and meaning. In other words, people who are struggling financially have more to be anxious about. They feel less secure. And they want to reduce their anxiety, their feelings of doubt and uncertainty. So they may be more inclined to double down on the belief, the hope, that their efforts will ultimately be rewarded, that they are part of a cultural system that is fair and just.
As some scholars have argued, it would perhaps be even more threatening to believe that the cultural system that one is participating in is unfair. This would mean not only are you facing the anxiety associated with your own economic uncertainty but you are also facing a larger, more existential, anxiety that results from feeling that you have no control over your fate. In short, to reject such a prominent cultural worldview is difficult because that worldview provides comfort and hope.
Hanauer and others who have made similar arguments are correct. Eventually, when things get bad enough, people revolt. What I would add though is that this revolt is more likely to come when people begin to more broadly invest in a different worldview or when they start to see the rich as enemies of the American worldview. Recently we saw politicians on the left attempting to take this approach by referring to American companies that were relocating overseas in order to pay lower taxes as unpatriotic and un-American.
As I said before, everyone has the economic facts. They are reminded daily of the ever-growing wealth gap. But what everyone has yet to embrace is the idea that our collective economic worldview in this nation may be failing us. And it is when people start to truly embrace that idea and they no longer cling to such a worldview for psychological security that we will see the pitchforks really come out.