And that gets to the heart of the matter. Is the crisis just one of those things - part of a natural economic cycle that is beyond anyone's ability to predict or control? Or is it a result of moral or intellectual failures among those who are are in charge of all the money.? Everyone has their own opinion, but what do most people think?
David Leiser and Rinat Benita, of Ben Gurion University, with Sacha Bourgeois-Gironde of the Institut Jean-Nicod, put this question via internet questionnaires to 1,707 people in France, the US, Russia, Germany, Israel, and sub-Saharan Africa.
[A note on how the study was done: The questionnaire was quite complex, but they used factor analysis to boil it down to two groups of questions that seemed to sort out two different groups of people - those who thought the crisis is a "systemic, global, unintended phenomenon" and those who thought it was a "local, individually and intentionally motivated one"]
On average, people were more inclined to go for the 'individual failure' explanation, rather than the 'unintended consequence' explanation:
... most people appear to construe an intentional, especially moral, reading of the crisis rather than conceive of it in terms of independent causal mechanisms. Purposiveness, be it under the guise of an intelligent design in nature or that of the secret interests of a vaguely identified group of businessmen, is the default explanation which seems to satisfy a primitive need for closurePeople who are wealthier, or who are trained in in economics, were less likely to believe in the 'human failure' theory. People who had been personally affected were more likely to.
But what about religious people? If, like me, you assumed that religious people would be more likely to put moral failings at the root of the crisis, you are in for a surprise.
Because it turns out that although the religious are more likely to blame moral failures, they are also more likely to subscribe to the 'economic storm' theory. As it happens, they actually were more likely than the non-religious to agree that "The current crisis comes as a punishment to all those who misbehaved in the past few years", but even here the difference was not huge
In other words, what marks out the more religious is not that they have different views on the crisis, but that they hold them with more conviction!
It isn't clear what should drive such an association. Conceivably, it reflects a preference for clarity over ambiguity that is often seen in people attracted to the more fundamentalist religions. Perhaps the religious are simply less comfortable with admitting "I don't know".
Leiser, D., Bourgeois-Gironde, S., & Benita, R. (2010). Human foibles or systemic failure—Lay perceptions of the 2008–2009 financial crisis Journal of Socio-Economics, 39 (2), 132-141 DOI: 10.1016/j.socec.2010.02.013
This article by Tom Rees was first published on Epiphenom. It is licensed under Creative Commons.
My experience has been that religious people have a tendency to hold all their beliefs, religious, political, whatever. And there's a tendency for them to live in a black and white world.
ReplyDeleteIt's a strange world.
I recently wrote about blame in an essay contest: There are many ways in which blame can be averted. First, you can claim that whatever harm was caused, it was an accident that occurred randomly. If it couldn’t have been random you can argue that it was unintentional and unplanned. You can claim that you did not know that what you did would have those consequences or that you were somehow incapable of knowing. You can actually argue that you thought it would have very positive consequences rather than negative ones and it was hard to predict otherwise. If you did know the consequences you could argue that you were unable to prevent it or had no other choice or at least really did not desire it to happen. You can argue that you chose the lesser of two evils and if you had done something else, something worse would have happened. In the end, you could say what happened would have happened anyway, even if you hadn’t done what you did.
ReplyDeleteYou can make a case that it is the fault of “the system” and you shouldn’t be singled out. An argument can be made that the harmful consequence was the result of a chain of events to which you or your organization may have contributed only little, and even that is ambiguous. All others responsible in that chain of events can probably claim the same thing and so ultimate responsibility will be diluted and no one takes the blame. Everybody agrees that “we are all to blame” but in fact no one is really held accountable…