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- Title
Self-Reliance and Empathy: The Enemies of Poverty—and of the Poor.
- Authors
Lane, Robert E.
- Abstract
Starting with a brief review of why all post-industrial societies tend to be inegalitarian, this paper develops two main themes: (1) how the idea that people are individually responsible for their own fates reduces poverty but impedes redistribution, and (2) how both the loose ties of individuals to their societies and the selective nature of their empathy and pity for others reduces compassion for the poor, making redistribution unlikely. The first theme is elaborated through psychological research on dispositional versus circumstantial attributions, showing their effects on the widely shared belief in a just world and more generally on the prevailing theory of the justice of deserts. The attribution-affect-action model is used to show how dispositional attributions evoke either anger or pity for victims and, if anger, then unwillingness to help. The development of the second theme shows how people divorce their own fates from those of their nations, how the basic tendency to favor the familiar and similar limits support for redistribution, how converting concern regarding deprivations of the self to concern for (fraternal) deprivation of people like the self excludes those who most need help, how envy fails to lead to redistribution, and finally, how people's ideas of the privileged and the disadvantaged reflect market values and often mark the poor and the different as overprivileged.
- Subjects
PAPER; SELF-reliance; EMPATHY; POVERTY; POOR people; POST-industrial society theory; PHYSICAL distribution of goods; PSYCHOLOGICAL research; NATIONAL socialism &; justice; FRATERNAL organizations
- Publication
Political Psychology, 2001, Vol 22, Issue 3, p473
- ISSN
0162-895X
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1111/0162-895x.00250