Thanks to Richard Cocks over at The Orthosphere (JMSmith's site) for this paper out of the University of Edinburgh (lin and Bates 2021) about attitudes regarding economic redistribution, fairness, compassion, and envy. Just for openers.
Richard links to it as part of a larger discussion about associations of Leftism and Self-Interest. He discusses AVI fave Jonathan Haidt along the way, though not much of it will be new to folks who have followed my discussions of him here over the years.
Lin & Bates:
ReplyDeleteThis research had three main findings. First, in two pre-registered studies it supported and replicated a role for communal fairness on support for distribution. Second, it confirmed the effects of envy, compassion, and self-interest on support for redistribution. Third, it extended understanding of these motives to account for support for coercive enforcement of redistribution. Jointly, the final motivational model accounted for over 40% of variance in support for redistribution and over 30%of variance in willingness to coerce compliance with redistribution.
I'm not a researcher, so the paper is tough going, but I enjoyed the article. It seems to me that altruism concepts are central to the idea of redistribution if it's to be of any benefit to society. In other words, it's a case of the process being the reward, not the end result - although the end result is also a net positive to all concerned.
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