In the study 'Moral consequences of becoming unemployed',
endorsed by the prestigious scientific journal PNAS, researchers at the
UPV/EHU's Faculty of Economics and Business and at the University of Nottingham
(UK) have analysed a moral consequence of unemployment that together with the
effects it has on people's mental health, could explain why these people become
disengaged from the labor market. 151 young adults in Córdoba and Bilbao were
involved in the study.
As Luis Miller asserts, "in general, both people in
employment and those in full-time education believe that people should be
allowed to keep most of what they earn and that it is OK for those who work
harder or who are more productive to earn more". He went on to say,
"When people become unemployed, our study indicates that they let go of
this belief. They put a higher value on the redistribution of money, which, in
social terms, would mean higher taxes on those earning more in order to fund
increased public spending."The authors of the study Luis Miller, lecturer
at the UPV/EHU's Faculty of Economics and Business, and Paloma Ubeda, a UPV/EHU
researcher, highlight the importance of understanding how becoming unemployed
affects people's behaviour. Many studies link unemployment and poverty with
depression, anxiety, stress, low levels of well-being and self-esteem, high
suicide rates, murder, alcohol-related deaths, etc. In this study, however, the
researchers have looked at a different kind of effect and have concluded that
unemployment changes people's morals around the distribution of money. It
should be pointed out that the study has been published in the latest edition
of the PNAS, a prestigious scientific journal which publishes relatively few
papers from the social sciences but which has given particular importance to
this one.
"In our study," explained Paloma Úbeda, "we
didn't ask the participants about re-distribution, taxes or public spending, as
the responses to questions of this type could be biased by the self-interest of
the interviewees. So high earners who look after their own interests would
prefer lower taxes, while low earners who also have their own interests in mind
would want higher taxes. What we were really interested in was understanding
how, when becoming unemployed, people change the way they see what is fair in
terms of re-distribution, in other words, whether they change their moral
values. We found that they do; when becoming unemployed people change the way
they think about fairness and re-distribution".
Unemployment leads to changes in opinions
To research people's ideals about justice, the researchers
involved 151 young adults aged between 18 and 35 in the so-called
"Distributive Justice Game", an experiment designed to reveal the
values and preferences of the participants about fairness and re-distribution.
The experiment was conducted in Bilbao and Córdoba. The game consisted of two
parts.
In the first part the participants "worked" for
the researchers for seven minutes. In the second part of the game each
participant was given a tray divided into four sections. Each section contained
a different amount of money. One of the sections belonged to the participant
who had been given the tray. The other three sections belonged to the other
three participants who were in their playing group. For some groups the amount
of money each one received depended on how much work the people had done during
the first part of the game. In others, the amount of money on the trays
depended totally on luck and were not related in any way to the work each
person had done. The participants could re-distribute the money among the four
sections in whatever way they wanted. Each one could keep all the money, leave
the tray as they had received it or re-distribute the money so that the four
participants would all receive the same amount at the end of the experiment.
"We found that the employed people tended to
re-distribute the money less when they knew people had earned their money in
the first part," asserted Luis Miller. "By contrast, they tended to
re-distribute it almost equally when they knew that the initial distributions
were just due to luck".
The 151 young adults participated twice in the experiment,
the first time in the spring of 2013 and the second exactly one year later.
Repeating the experiment allowed the researchers to see whether the people who
were employed or in full-time education during the first year of the study but
ended up unemployed in the second year changed their opinions about fairness
and re-distribution.
Most of those who had become unemployed re-distributed the
money in such a way that the other three members of their group ended up with
approximately the same amount of money irrespective of whether the money had
been earned or received as a result of luck.
Paloma Úbeda added that "the extent to which people
recognise the individual right to keep what they have earned has significant
implications on the way people vote, on how they pay their taxes or on how they
act in the labour market. However, all these implications would need to be
studied in greater detail in future pieces of research".
Luis Miller concluded that "the significance of the
main result of this study to understand the labour dynamics as well as the most
appropriate public intervention depends to what extent the negative effect we
find can be reversed. Right now, we are already working on new projects that
seek to establish whether the unemployed need to re-acquire part of the values
relating to effort and productivity abandoned along the way before effectively
reengaging with the labour market. Then assuming they do, we would need to
investigate how this new change of values takes place and also how public
interventions can contribute towards enabling this process".
Explore further:
Study results suggest people are less cooperative in unequal societies when
wealth inequality is evident
More information: Moral consequences of becoming unemployed
, PNAS,www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1521250113
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