Deservingness versus values in public opinion on welfare: The automaticity of the deservingness heuristic

Abstract

Public attitudes towards welfare policy are often explained by political values and perceptions of deservingness of welfare recipients. This article addresses how the impact of values and perceptions varies depending on the contextual information that citizens have available when forming welfare opinions. It is argued that whenever citizens face deservingness‐relevant cues in public debate or the media, a psychological ‘deservingness heuristic’ is triggered prompting individuals spontaneously to think about welfare policy in terms of who deserves help. This is an automatic process, equally influential among the least and the most politically sophisticated. Moreover, when clear deservingness cues are present, the impact of values on opinions vanishes. These arguments are supported by data from two novel experimental studies embedded in separate nationwide opinion surveys. The findings revise conventional wisdom of how values and heuristics influence public opinion and have major implications for understanding dynamics in aggregate welfare opinion and attempts from political elites to manipulate public opinion.

The Deservingness Heuristic and the Politics of Health Care

“…Given research on the deservingness heuristic, information linking individual choice and the need for government assistance may be expected to reduce public support; that jobless individuals are easy to frame as undeserving has, in fact, already been documented (Petersen et al 2011;Slothuus 2007). In contrast to these findings, we predict that the effects of more effortful, explicit considerations related to both self-interest and explicit information about controllability are much smaller for health care due to the implicit constraints identified in Study 1.…”

“…In the welfare state literature, psychological theory has been used to highlight the importance of such perceptions about the causes of a welfare recipient's need for benefits when forming welfare opinions Petersen et al 2011;Skitka & Tetlock 1993;van Oorschot 2000). Multiple studies have converged on the notion that a psychological heuristicthe deservingness heuristic-prompts individuals to oppose welfare benefits when the need reflects a lack of motivation (i.e., "laziness") but support benefits when the need is caused by random events beyond the individual's control (i.e., "bad luck").…”

“…Consistent with this view, recent empirical work has demonstrated that the deservingness heuristic engages deep-seated psychological processes. It operates (1) automatically (Petersen et al 2011); (2) through mechanisms of affect, with anger being activated toward the unmotivated and compassion toward the unfortunate (Brandt 2013;; (3) on the basis of the exact same psychological machinery used to make help-giving decisions in everyday life ; and (4) in psychologically powerful ways such that other relevant considerations (e.g., cultural stereotypes and political values) are down-weighted once the heuristic is activated (Aarøe and Petersen 2014;Petersen et al 2011. Past research on the deservingness heuristic has provided substantial insight into the psychological processes that are activated after a welfare recipient is categorized as in or without control, respectively.…”

“…This predicted role of implicit psychological constraints operating behind the support for government spending on health care has important political consequences, as suggested by decades of psychological research on explicit versus implicit processes (Greenwald, Nosek, and Banaji 2003;Haidt 2001). Implicit, intuitive factors often come to dominate judgments and behaviors at the expense of explicit, more effortful considerations related to, for example, ideological consistency and selfinterest (see Haidt 2001; for political applications, see Lodge and Taber 2013;Petersen et al 2011). In the context of health care politics, an underlying implicit bias could make health care support impervious to the kinds of considerations that form the basis of opinion formation on other political issues.…”

“…Only to the extent that sufficiently clear intuitions are not generated in response to a decision task will people begin to engage in more effortful processing (Alter et al 2007;Gill, Swann, and Silvera 1998). In the context of deservingness and welfare opinions, for example, when clear cues of deservingness are not available, people rely more on political values (Petersen et al 2011) and cultural (Aarøe and Petersen 2014) and ideological stereotypes. When clear deservingness cues are available, however, the effect of these more cognitively demanding factors is effectively crowded out.…”