Study suggests the COVID-19 pandemic has altered Americans attitudes toward inequality and the poor

The coronavirus pandemic may have altered how many people in the United States view the poor, according to new research published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. The study indicates that people became more likely to blame external factors for poverty and less likely to blame personal failings after the outbreak of the virus.

Based on their previous research, the authors of the new study had reason to believe that the pandemic might alter attitudes about the poor and inequality.

“My co-authors and I recently published a paper in Nature Human Behavior in which we found that one reason driving American’s relatively low concern about economic inequality is that people don’t readily recognize the situational causes of poverty (e.g., discrimination, luck), and instead assume that poverty is caused by dispositional factors (e.g., laziness),” explained study author Dylan Wiwad, a postdoctoral fellow at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

“We also showed that a simple intervention (a 10-minute poverty simulation, www.playspent.org) successfully increased recognition of these uncontrollable causes of poverty and subsequently reduced tolerance for inequality.”

“When the coronavirus pandemic hit in mid-March we began to wonder if this global and highly visible event would have the same effects. The pandemic provided a rare opportunity to see if our findings held ‘in the wild’ with a sort of natural intervention. Effectively, would this highly visible exogenous shock to poverty and inequality change an individual’s attributions for poverty and tolerance for inequality?”

“We also saw the opportunity to explore this question with longitudinal data. So instead of seeing between-group differences, we could explore whether individuals actually exhibited attitude change in the wake of the pandemic,” Wiwad said.

The researchers used the online Prolific platform to survey 453 Americans in April 2019 regarding their attributions of poverty and other factors. The participants were asked how important they believed various dispositional and situational factors were in explaining unemployment and poverty in the United States.

A subgroup of 233 of the original participants completed a second survey in May 2020, following the coronavirus outbreak in the United States. In the second survey, the participants also indicated the extent to which they believed the pandemic had negatively impacted the U.S. economy and other facets of life.

The researchers found that the participants reported lower dispositional attributions for poverty and higher situational attributions for poverty in the wake of the pandemic.

“I think one of the important takeaways from the study is a small silver lining from the pandemic. Our paper showed that the pandemic has exacted some positive shifts in egalitarianism and beliefs about the poor. Throughout the pandemic, our data suggest that there has been some greater awareness in how uncontrollable events can exacerbate poverty. While the pandemic has worsened poverty and inequality, the small silver lining then is that it might also mobilize people who see this damage to help and make change where it counts,” Wiwad told PsyPost.

But the pandemic was only associated with increased opposition to inequality and increased support for government intervention among those who most strongly acknowledged its negative impact.

“With our modeling of the longitudinal data we were able to show that the pandemic likely caused shifts in both attributions for poverty and support for inequality and government intervention to alleviate poverty and inequality. However, we saw overall attitude change (i.e., in average attitudes between April 2019 and May 2020) only on attributions for poverty but not support for inequality or government intervention,” Wiwad explained.

“This suggests that while everyone appears to have increased their recognition of the situational causes of poverty amidst the pandemic, only for those who actually recognized the negative impact of COVID-19 on the poor did this change in attributions for poverty actually translate into decreased support for inequality and increased support for government intervention to help the poor.”

But there is still much to learn about how the pandemic has impacted socio-political attitudes and behaviors. “For one, it is important to understand if these attitude shifts actually translate into behavior. Do people donate more to the poor? Will they support COVID-related stimulus packages? We discuss a few more future questions in the paper, but I think this is the most important one,” Wiwad said.

The study, “Recognizing the Impact of COVID-19 on the Poor Alters Attitudes Towards Poverty and Inequality“, was authored by Dylan Wiwad, Brett Mercier, Paul K. Piff, Azim Shariff, and Lara B. Aknin.