The affluent are in denial about their class privilege, research says

The affluent are in denial about their class privilege, research says

Income is correlated with right-wing politics, meaning wealthier people tend to be slightly more conservative. While there is no singular reason for this, both history and observational anecdotes suggest that those with wealth and privilege tend to distort the reason they were so successful, chalking up their success to right-wing ideological canards like “hard work” — rather than admit they were helped by other social factors. (President Trump is a great case study, as he exaggerates the degree to which his father helped him build his empire: during the first 2016 presidential debate, Trump bragged that his father gave him “a very small loan in 1975,” which he built “into a company that’s worth many, many billions of dollars.” That “small loan” was actually $60.7 million.)

Now, a new social psychology study has uncovered the extent to which this tendency appears to be pathological among the moneyed elite. Titled “I ain’t no fortunate one: On the motivated denial of class privilege,” the new study, which was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, found that those who were posed questions about their class privilege responded by “increasing their claims of personal hardships and hard work, to cover [their] privilege in a veneer of meritocracy.” 

“Flying in the face of meritocratic prescriptions, evidence of privilege threatens recipients’ self-regard by calling into question whether they deserve their successes.” Dr. L. Taylor Phillips, a professor of management and organizations at New York University Business School, and co-author Dr. Brian S. Lowery, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford University, wrote in their study. “Evidence of class privilege demonstrates that many life outcomes are determined by factors not attributable to individuals’ efforts alone, but are caused in part by systemic inequities that privilege some over others.”

The authors emphasized that, in the United States, people are conditioned to believe that we live in a meritocracy and to attribute success or failure primarily to one’s talent and hard work. When members of the upper-middle or upper class are confronted with evidence that class privilege plays a major role in determining socioeconomic status, their self-regard is challenged. To maintain their sense of self-worth, they will exaggerate their own hardships or focus on the amount of work they do — even though class privilege does not preclude the reality of non-class related hardships and many people work very hard without achieving socioeconomic mobility.

https://www.salon.com/2020/07/13/the-affluent-are-in-denial-about-their-class-privilege-research-says/