The Broken Ladder

April 1, 2017
The surprising consequences of inequality.In a wide-ranging exploration of how we view ourselves in relation to others, Payne (Psychology and Neuroscience/Univ. of North Carolina) shows that "the social comparisons we make can alter how we see the world." Going beyond obvious measures--e.g., income, education, and employment--the author argues that the key to understanding what lies at the heart of self-perception is the hunger for status, which humans crave. Comparing ourselves to the people we meet each day, and often falling short, we set ourselves up for acting and thinking in predictable, generally detrimental ways. For example, Payne recalls the moment from his school days when he discovered that getting a free lunch made him different. He soon noticed other kids dressed better, and so on: "Inequality makes people feel poor and act poor, even when they're not." Smartly blending personal observations with recent research in psychology and neuroscience (his own and that of others), he details how our perceived relative position in the scheme of things plays a "critical role" in shaping our biases, habits, and ideas. "There are good reasons," he writes, "why people with different experiences tend to have incompatible understandings of the world." In revealing vignettes, Payne describes how feelings of inequality help account for our political choices, unhealthy behaviors, racial prejudices, and tendency to seek meaningful patterns. He also explains why poor women often have more children and why working-class individuals are less inclined to plan for the future. We experience inequality most directly in hierarchical workplaces, and there would be far less job satisfaction if the extreme inequality in CEO pay was more widely known. In discussing the "implicit bias" involved in killings of unarmed black men by police, he cites numerous studies showing people are "more likely to think they saw a gun when it was linked to a black face." Though the author doesn't break much new ground, he provides valuable psychological insights into our daily behaviors.

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March 15, 2017

The social and economic impacts of inequality are profound, and well-documented, but what of the psychological effects? Payne (psychology, Univ. of North Carolina) makes a strong, evidence-based case that inequality, or simply the perception of inequality, affects us individually in ways that are also profound, life-changing, and predictable. He gathers the fascinating, and sometimes unsettling, findings from an array of surveys and experiments, field observations, and socioeconomic trends that address such issues as why, evolutionarily, people who are (or feel) poor live in the moment, and why people who are (or feel) well-off prepare for the future. Touching upon implicit bias, the deepening political divide, and the accelerating concentration of wealth among the superrich, his research also looks at how stress, biologically intended as a brief reaction to an immediate crisis, became a long-term state of being; and what connects race, discrimination, and inequality. On the policy level, Payne suggests a path to reduce inequality by identifying and responding to it as a public health problem. On the individual level, he recommends shifting from a focus on comparisons with others to attention to what we most value. VERDICT This timely and accessible volume unpacks a complex problem, and points toward solutions.--Janet Ingraham Dwyer, State Lib. of Ohio, Columbus

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