“Even among those who were the most privileged, they also had to stay home and follow certain rules,” he says. Nicole Stephens, professor of management and organizations at the Kellogg School. “And so the pandemic was this leveling force that touched everyone, to some extent.”
Of course, hopes for a major equalizer were short-lived. It quickly became clear that the pandemic was taking a grossly disproportionate tolls in communities of color, exacerbates wealth inequalityand pushing low-wage workers out of work much more than their higher-income counterparts.
Thus, the pandemic did not actually reduce economic inequalities. But Stephens, along with a group of collaborators, wondered if it might have changed the way Americans think about inequality and its causes. After all, the rich and the poor had just witnessed a massive, unchecked force wreaking havoc on society and the economy. Did this make them more receptive to the idea that inequality can sometimes be beyond a person’s control? And if so, were they more inclined to support certain policies — specifically, those that address structural causes of social and economic inequality?
Stephens explored these questions in a recent study with former Kellogg doctoral students Hannah J. Birnbaumnow assistant professor at Washington University in St. Louis, and Andrea G. Dittmannnow an adjunct professor at Emory University, as well Rebecca M. Careyformer Kellogg postdoc, now adjunct professor at Princeton University, Stanford psychologist Hazel Rose Marcusand a Stanford PhD candidate in psychology Ellen C. Reinhart.
Their findings suggest that the pandemic made people more inclined to see inequality as a product of uncontrollable social factors—but only if they had personally suffered direct medical, economic, or psychological harm due to COVID.
“You have to be affected before you care,” he says. “This suggests a fairly self-centered, selfish view of what motivates people to care about social justice.”
How Americans Think About Inequality
To understand their study, it is important to first understand the different ways people can interpret inequality.
Broadly speaking, there are two ways that people can understand the causes of inequality: either as a result of a person’s individual choices and actions, or as a result of contextual forces such as the neighborhood in which a person grew up, the their access to health care, or the quality of education they received.
And while Stephens says there are “hundreds of studies showing that structural and contextual forces play an important role,” some people tend to underestimate the powerful pull of these external forces in shaping life outcomes.
Specifically, compared to people in other cultures, Americans tend to see individuals as more in control of their own destiny and to frame social or economic differences as consequences of individual choices. This understanding of inequality as rooted in personal choice is particularly evident among Americans from high-status groups, including those who are male, wealthy, or white.
The researchers suspected that the pandemic could put a major wrinkle in that worldview. “When people could no longer leave home, seek medical care, spend the holidays with family or send their children to school, they saw the impact of this loss of personal freedom and choice first hand. The pandemic has really taken away the sense of personal control that people can often create,” says Stephens.
The researchers wondered if the pandemic, which gave everyone a taste of what it was like to have one’s personal autonomy limited by an uncontrollable external force, could have a similar effect? In fact, previous research has shown that greater exposure to inequality—from they work in an underserved schoolfor example, or participating in a poverty simulation— can help people understand the external factors that make it difficult or impossible to move up in society.
To find out what impact COVID had on people’s thinking about inequality, the researchers designed a survey to record participants’ experiences during COVID and their beliefs about inequality and sent it to participants three times between May 2020 and May 2021. This allowed them to track how the pandemic shaped the views of nearly 700 participants in real time.
Several of the questions in the survey explored whether participants had experienced various types of personal harm during the pandemic, ranging from financial (e.g., financial difficulties or job loss) to physical (e.g., sleep disturbance or personal infection with the virus) to the psychological and emotional (eg, experiencing a mental health episode or even having a friend or family member die of COVID).
Other questions explored whether participants supported pro-justice policies (such as universal basic income or free COVID testing), whether they had taken actions to support those policies (such as contacting a public official or sharing social media posts); and whether they believe inequality is attributable to external factors (such as discrimination or low-quality schools).
How the Pandemic Reshaped Americans’ Views and Defense of Inequality
The researchers found that the more personal harm a participant reported experiencing during the first wave of the survey, the more likely they were to have taken action to support equality by the last wave.
Statistical methods showed that this association was not simply due to underlying factors such as age, race, income, or political affiliation, or to beliefs unrelated to the pandemic. Instead, the researchers found that this increase in advocacy could be explained, in part, by a changed understanding of inequality: those who were more harmed also had an increased tendency to attribute inequality to external forces rather than individual factors, such as hard work. .
At the same time, after controlling for other factors, those who experienced little personal harm were no more likely to engage in advocacy—or to support structural explanations for economic or social inequalities—than they were at the start of the pandemic.
The findings showed that the effects of COVID on Americans’ worldviews were more nuanced than expected. “You could imagine a theory that everyone would change the way they think about the causes of inequality because they see how powerful the pandemic is in shaping what’s possible for others,” says Stephens. “But it wasn’t like that.”
Stephens notes that this finding is consistent with previous research showing that people struggle to effectively take the perspectives of others.
“Because people like to imagine, ‘If I were in their shoes, here’s what I would do differently,'” he explains. “And so, people tend to self-centeredly impose their own perspective, which includes their own situation, their own context, their own resources, on other people. And when you don’t actually learn about what other people are thinking and feeling, that can actually backfire and lead to less empathy, less understanding, and more victim blaming.”
Arguably, witnessing the suffering of others during COVID simply reinforced some people’s beliefs that they would have coped better with the same adversity and therefore deserve more merit.
For those who see a more equal society worth pursuing, there’s a glass-half-full for the study’s findings: The pandemic appeared to have galvanized support for policies that could help combat inequality, at least among a certain subset of Americans. While Stephens notes that this is by no means the only or most effective way to shift people’s thinking about inequality, she says, “I think you could argue that this is the silver lining of a really catastrophic event like a pandemic”.