Sharing the Wealth

All News @ UCSB

Economic redistribution has been a core political dispute around the world for centuries. And while intuitively fairness seems a natural explanation for why people support redistribution, researchers at UC Santa Barbara find that fairness doesn’t really explain who supports redistribution or why.Support for redistribution, they have shown, is rooted in compassion, self-interest and envy — but not fairness. Their work is published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Prototypical characters
“Understanding the economic and political nitty-gritty of redistribution does not come naturally to us,” said Daniel Sznycer, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Montreal, a research scientist at UCSB’s Center for Evolutionary Psychology, and the paper’s lead author. “But humans have been interacting with worse-off and better-off individuals over evolutionary time. This process built neural systems that motivate us to act effectively in situations of giving, taking and sharing.
“The evolved human mind,” he continued, “would overlook the public policy complexities of modern redistribution and instead perceive it in terms of a much simpler mental model featuring a small number of prototypical characters — the self, the worse-off other and the better-off other — and different motives directed at each character.”
To understand the logic behind support for — or opposition to — economic redistribution, the research team focused on three motives: compassion, self-interest and envy.
First compassion
 “Our ancestors lived in a world without social or medical insurance, and so they benefited from covering each other’s shortfalls through mutual help,” said John Tooby, a professor of anthropology at UCSB and co-director of the Center for Evolutionary Psychology. “If your neighbor is starving and you have food, you can save his life by sharing with him. Later, when the situation is reversed and he shares his food with you, your life is saved.”
This evolutionary dynamic selected for a spontaneous motivation to ...

Read More