Most of us know that how you look at a problem influences how you assess it and what solutions you prefer. This framing effect can easily be shown by asking people to assess the health benefits of, say, a cup of yoghurt that has the label “99% fat-free” and compare it to a yoghurt with the label “1% fat”. On average, people will think of the 99% fat-free yoghurt as healthier than the 1% fat yoghurt, though both labels describe the same kind of yoghurt.
This framing effect is also in action when it comes to more important societal developments like our attitudes toward rising inequality as a study in Nature has demonstrated neatly.
For example, in one experiment, 32,000 people from 34 countries were asked to rate whether they attributed poverty in their country to situational causes (general unfairness in society) or behavioural causes (poor people are lazy or lack the discipline and willpower to do something about their poverty). Then they asked the participants if income differences in their countries should be larger or smaller.
The result across countries is shown in the chart below. Countries where the population thinks poverty is mostly driven by behavioural effects are far more accepting of income inequality than countries where the population thinks that poverty is mostly driven by situational effects and less by individual behaviours. Note the relatively extreme status of the United States where poor people are much more commonly derided as “welfare queens”, “lazy”, and “unwilling to work” than in European countries. The result is that inequality is much more acceptable to Americans than to Europeans.
Attitude towards inequality and poverty
Source: Piff et al. (2020)
This difference in attitude toward poverty and inequality is an increasingly important dividing line between Europeans and Americans when it comes to attitudes about policies and society. In essence, the American attitude toward inequality and poverty is driven largely by the ‘American Dream’ where one can go from rags to riches through hard labour and a little bit of luck (but mostly hard labour). The result of this attitude is a society that is much more driven by individualism, and at the same time more dynamic and entrepreneurial.
In Europe, meanwhile, we have thousands of years of experience with societies that have collapsed into civil war or war because they became too unequal (For a list of some historical highlights I recommend the wonderful but now defunct podcast “Revolutions”). In a sense, we value stability more than individualism and as a result, are more opposed to inequality as a destabilising factor in society. The result is a tighter social fabric and better social safety net to catch the losers in society but the price we pay is less economic dynamism.
I am not passing judgment on one model of society being better than another, but I want to emphasise that one can make Americans more opposed to inequality by confronting them with individual examples of poverty. If you know somebody who has fallen on hard times or if you have fallen on hard times yourself, your attitudes toward inequality change drastically. And I can assure you from my own experience that this is true.
As an American who's lived in Europe for over 20 years, I totally agree with this. Strauss-Howe Generational Theory maps out how age cohorts behave differently, especially with regard to toleration of income inequality, depending on their distance from a "Crisis Turning" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss–Howe_generational_theory#Timing_of_generations_and_turnings ... which tend to be 20-25 years in length. Comedian George Carlin once famously said "It's called 'The American Dream' because you have to be asleep to believe it" https://youtu.be/-54c0IdxZWc .
The Great Depression hit all developed economies hard, both winners and losers, but one can argue that America exited the war unbelievably well-positioned to flourish and prosper to a degree that Germany and Japan couldn't realistically achieve for another 20 years (and from which the UK sort of never really recovered), especially as they had to completely rebuild their infrastructures as well (which, ironically, set them up to dominanate manufacturing a lot longer than the US could on a rusting manufacturing base by the 1980s). America and Britain also had well-developed and funded national stimulus programs (Interstate Highway System), research funding (Apollo Program), pensions, and welfare systems (Social Security, NHS), etc., but one can can argue that Reaganism and Thatcherism were manifestations of the Strauss-Howe view that "unravelings come after Awakenings when society wants to atomize and enjoy". Meanwhile, Europe and Japan, on a 20-year lag, remained staunchly more collectivist, not necessarily because they were more compassionate, but because they were time-wise closer to the really bad stuff (poor people create social unrest and support dictators) and (as the US did to get out of the Depression) needed lots of comfortably-paid and well-educated middle-class labor to keep all the machinery running. One could argue that Europe started to reach the same point in 2000, and is now catching up (AfD, LaPen, even Brexit), and indeed inequality is starting to rise https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_equality . Like Klement, I think one's time proximity and exposure to "family lore" on tough times governs one's views on inequality a great deal.
I have another (highly unscientific) observation when things work the other way: Cigarette smoking was a lot more prevalent early on in the US, partly because that's where tobacco is grown, but also because factory-rolled cigarettes were first developed and marketed there https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays#Tobacco there (Camels were standard issue to US soldiers in WWI). As a result, one can argue that the US had a 25-year lead on mass-market smoking. The average onset of lung cancer is 66, so the first wave of ill-effects were first visible to extended families right around the time of the Surgeon General's Report in 1964 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoking_and_Health . I think that negative "family lore" came a lot earlier than it did for many in Europe, where mass-market smoking was a later phenomenon, and as a result is only now is it starting to become socially-unacceptable in Europe. I suspect that obesity appears to be on a similar time-lag, sadly in the wrong direction :-(
^Re: "Like Klement, I think one's time proximity and exposure to "family lore" on tough times governs one's views on inequality a great deal.", my wife any my kids are mid-20s, we are nearly 60, our parents are mid-80s, and our grandparents are dead but would be 110-120. On this timeline, even though my grandparents lived into the time my kids were born, the latter were too young to have heard any Roaring '20s/Great Depression/WWII lore from them as I did growing up. My American parents are still alive, but (unless you include 1970s Energy Crisis/inflation stories) have nothing but positive family stories to tell. On the other hand, my German wife's parents (born mid/late-'30s as well) still have *plenty* of stories on wartime bombings, shortages, rationing, widespread poverty, etc. As a result, my wife and I have massive differences of opinion on household decisions; I tend to be generous in wanting to donate old clothes and don't want to clutter up the attic, garage, or yard, whilst my wife is a hoarder who pack-rats everything, stocks canned food (that inevitably goes bad), drags in scrap wood etc., and generally doesn't throw stuff away with the view that "you never know when you might need it".
Similarly, I lean left-of-center politically myself, but find myself sometimes find myself hearing about the occasional super de luxe German government program or benefit and think to myself "hmmm ... isn't that a disincentive to actually working?" or see how many people (including my wife!) are on the local city governmen payroll and think "hmmm ... should taxes really be this high to pay for all these people warming office chairs?" My German wife *does* complain about things, but seems resigned to them being permanent deadweight losses as part of the price of social cohesion ("if they fired all those civil servants, what would they do except go on welfare anyway"), whereas some days(especially in the wake of recent public transportation strikes) I feel *very* American about things ("why don't they just fire anyone for six months and "fix on fail" and re-hire only as things start to break ... like Ronald Reagan did with the air traffic controllers?" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_Air_Traffic_Controllers_Organization_(1968) )