The Rich in Public Opinion

What We Think When We Think About Wealth

Rainer Zitelmann

• Publisher: Cato Institute
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781948647687
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Clases sociales y disparidad económica

What do people in the United States and Europe think about the rich? There are several thousand books and articles on stereotypes and prejudices directed at women, people of various races or nationalities, and even the poor. In contrast, there has only been sporadic research into stereotypes about the rich and no published comprehensive, scientific study on the topic—until now.

Negative prejudices and stereotypes have repeatedly been used to justify the exclusion, expulsion,persecution, and murder of minorities who have been scapegoated at times of social crises. The 20th century is full of examples of wealthy people, including capitalists, kulaks, and other groups, who were victims of deadly persecution. These were exceptional situations but, even in moderate forms, prejudice against social groups harms society as a whole—not just the rich—through economic or physical destruction and declining prosperity.

In The Rich in Public Opinion: What We Think When We Think about Wealth, historian and sociologist Rainer Zitelmann examines attitudes about wealth and the wealthy in four industrialized Western countries: Germany, the United States, France, and Great Britain. Consisting of three parts, this book first surveys the literature about stereotypes and prejudices. Zitelmann then reports on never-before-seen data commissioned by the polling firm Ipsos MORI and from the Allensbach Institute, which conducted identical surveys of residents of four countries regarding various aspects of their attitudes toward wealth. Lastly, The Rich in Public Opinion looks at the portrayal of the rich in media and film.

People often admire the wealthy, but Zitelmann shows that people can also envy them—a sometimes toxic envy that can put lives at risk. This book aims to examine how we think about a minority that, while undeniably powerful, can still be the subject of negative stereotypes, prejudice, and scapegoating—often with dire effects for us all.

PART ONE

Prejudice, Classism, and the Rich

CHAPTER 1

WHAT ARE PREJUDICES AND STEREOTYPES?

One can have prejudices about many things, but today the term is mostly used in connection with opinions about groups of people; it often refers to opinions about minority groups. We rarely use the term when someone has a positive opinion of a group of people. And we also don’t use the term colloquially if we share the other person’s opinion or regard it as correct. By accusing another person of prejudice, what we really mean to say is, “You have a negative opinion of a group of people, and your opinion is wrong.”

This everyday use of the word is problematic; it conveys unspoken assumptions that need to be critically questioned. The first assumption is that a prejudice is an unfounded and erroneous opinion. The second assumption is that a prejudice is a negative opinion. The third assumption is that if only the person we accuse of prejudice were better informed, that person would have arrived at a different, more positive opinion.

Prejudice, when used this way, is not a scientific term; it is a polemic term. And that is how it is mostly used in everyday language. Researchers who have studied prejudice do not uncritically accept this use of the term. Many researchers deny that a prejudice must necessarily be wrong. Some also deny that it has to be negative. I will come to both points later.

ARE OUR JUDGMENTS REALLY BALANCED AND FACT BASED?

I would like to start with the most complicated question, namely, whether prejudice arises because someone has not dealt intensively, in sufficient detail, with an issue—or with a group of people. The prefix “pre-,” coming before the root indicating judgment, suggests that someone has made a judgment before finding out all the facts. Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary defines “prejudice” as a “preconceived judgment or opinion” and an “adverse opinion or leaning formed without just grounds or before sufficient knowledge.”²²

These definitions leave many questions unanswered, however. Does anyone always use all the facts available to them before forming an opinion? Isn’t it entirely unrealistic to expect the majority of people to know or consider all the facts about the things they judge and to arrive at their judgments only after a comprehensive investigation? If we take this broader concept of prejudice to its extreme, we would have to accept that all judgments not made by specialists are, by their very nature, prejudices.

An unspoken misconception underpinning many notions of prejudice is that having extensive knowledge of a subject is a cast-iron guarantee against negative prejudices. This is not the case, because value judgments cannot generally be derived from factual findings or considerations. If someone has deep-seated negative feelings toward a group of people, then even developing a deeper factual understanding of that group will not always lead to a more positive attitude. When confronted by information that contradicts their views of an out-group, many people acknowledge the information but interpret it in such a way as to reinforce their prejudice: conflicting data are filed away as the exception that confirms the rule.

Whether people justify their negative attitudes with a barrage of facts and dispassionate language or whether they simply let their negative emotions run their course in the form of derogatory statements has a lot to do with their education and linguistic abilities, but it may have little to do with their degree of prejudice.

There are even researchers who spend their whole lives gathering facts that reinforce their original prejudices about a subject. One can rightly argue that those researchers are not upholding scientific standards at all, because such an approach does not meet the criteria of objectivity that is the hallmark of science properly conducted. Nevertheless, many of these researchers are held in high regard; they may be professors at prestigious universities and may use the methods, arguments, and language of science. They can be criticized for a great deal of things, but they certainly cannot be accused of not having dealt sufficiently with an issue.

The complexity of the matter is illustrated by the fact that the number of definitions of prejudice is almost as great as the number of authors writing about it. Some of those definitions will be presented and discussed below to explain how I use the term in this book.

Gordon Allport’s classic treatise The Nature of Prejudice contains the shortest definition we will examine: “thinking ill of others without sufficient warrant.”²³ Allport also added that this first attempt to define the term was inadequate and proposed the following definition: “an avertive or hostile attitude toward a person who belongs to a group, simply because he belongs to that group, and is therefore presumed to have the objectionable qualities ascribed to the group.”²⁴

Not every negative generalization is a prejudice in Allport’s view, although he considers the term to be justified if a person is not prepared to change his or her judgment in the face of conflicting information. “Prejudgments become prejudices only if they are not reversible when exposed to new knowledge.”²⁵

We have since learned that prejudice is not always irreversible, and that people and even whole societies can change their attitudes toward groups. The latter can sometimes happen within a few decades, as the changing attitudes toward gay and lesbian people in many Western societies show.

The definition Earl E. Davis proposed in 1964 therefore seems somewhat more precise—albeit only with a view to the question of immutability and rigidity. He does not claim that prejudices and stereotypes are irreversible but says that they are difficult to correct, which is more accurate: “[Prejudices] are usually characterized by (a) over-generalization (the traits are attributed to all, or nearly all, members of a race, nation, etc.); (b) over-simplification (one, or at most a few, characteristics are used to encompass the complexity of a whole race, nation, etc.); and (c) rigidity (due to selective perception and interpretation, contrary evidence is often either ignored or seen as confirming the preconceived notion).”²⁶ However, this definition has other weaknesses, because it generally reduces prejudices to negative attitudes. That need not be the case.

In early research, prejudices were often regarded as diseases and as expressions of personality disorders. Thus, prejudices would be exceptions rather than the rule. In 1969, Heinz E. Wolf distinguished between the “exception thesis” and the “equality thesis.” According to the equality thesis, the emergence of prejudice is an inevitable process that affects all human beings. Nobody is therefore free of prejudice; only the intensity and object of the prejudice must be differentiated.²⁷ The exception thesis, on the other hand, assumes that prejudice is an individual form of behavior typical of a specific personality type. The concept of the “authoritarian personality” developed by Theodor Adorno and others is a classic example of this line of thought. The problem with this approach is that those who did not share the researchers’ political opinions were all too quickly dismissed as “prejudiced people with a pathological character structure.”²⁸ These definitions perpetuated the view that prejudice was inappropriate.

According to sociologist Bernd Estel, an important characteristic of prejudice in the general consciousness is its “factual inappropriateness, its falsehood.”²⁹ Prejudice is to be regarded as predominantly false, or at least as biased or one-sided, if

•the underlying (correct) information basis is too narrow to really permit a judgment (“prejudgment”); or

•the person making the judgment bases his judgment only on the limited information available to him (“bias,” “preconception”); or

•the person refuses to take note of (new) information that contradicts his judgment (“rigidity”).³⁰

These criteria seem questionable. After all, by these standards, almost all of the judgments we make in everyday situations could be classified as prejudices. When is the underlying information basis for a judgment too narrow? And what is the benchmark for determining whether a judgment is based on sufficient information? Can it be said that direct, personal exposure to the facts is a sufficient prerequisite, or must that be supplemented by in-depth or even quasi-scientific research? Not everyone is in a position to carry out such research. The claim that most people use only a small selection of the information available to them as a basis for their judgments is also likely to apply to a majority of judgments in the wider sense. And we often take less notice of information that contradicts our judgments; people commonly exhibit selective perception.

In addition, there will not necessarily be a consensus among people with comparable knowledge and information on how to weight and evaluate that information. Otherwise, all equally well-informed persons would share a similar political conviction or ideology, for example. We all know that’s not the case, and it seems incorrect to conclude that all disagreements are matters of prejudice. Even after a very extensive and intensive study of a subject, people will arrive at different conclusions. The same conclusion may, from one person’s point of view, be a gross prejudice based on a mistaken perception of reality, whereas for the other, it is a factual finding.

Wolf provides the following definition: “Prejudice is defined as a binding statement made on a subject without sufficient, objective knowledge of the empirical factual structure or having taken it into account…. The definition contains one main and two secondary criteria, the last two being mutually exclusive: a) The binding nature of the statement (main criteria), with b) a lack of sufficient, objective knowledge, or c) disregard of this knowledge. Prejudices are thus defined by criteria a+b or a+c.”³¹

The weakness of this definition lies, among other things, in the lack of clarity as to what constitutes the “sufficient, objective knowledge” required to ensure that a judgment is not a prejudice. When is my knowledge sufficient? Many opinions held by people who don’t have “sufficient, objective knowledge of the empirical factual structure” are also held by experts who have dealt intensively with the subject. Thus, great expertise does not automatically lead to a correct judgment, and lack of expertise does not necessarily lead to an erroneous judgment.

ARE ALL PREJUDICES WRONG?

Prejudices and stereotypes themselves have been stereotyped by repeatedly ascribing to them characteristics such as “inaccurate,” “unjustified,” “exaggerated,” and “not based on empirical evidence”—without carrying out empiric...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Part One: Prejudice, Classism, and the Rich
• Part Two: What the Germans, Americans, French, and British Think of the Rich
• Part Three: Media Representations of the Rich
• Conclusion
• Annex: The Questionnaire
• Notes
• Bibliography
• About the Author
• Cato Institute