Impacts of Interpersonal Relationships (2)

In my last post, I discussed the importance of Trust in society, as well as between people. This post is going to focus on a specific cause of lower trust – income inequality. I am not going to approach this topic from any sort of a political angle. I don’t believe that a topic like trust, depression, or income inequality has any business being influenced by politics. They are far too important to fall across party lines -that would only further the current lack of trust that I mentioned in my last post.

Important Note: This post is not an inditement of Capitalism, rather an acknowledgment of a paradox.

Income Inequality: Are Our Intuitions are Correct?

There are many factors that lead to the existence of income inequality; however, I am not going to focus on those per se. Instead, I am going to focus on our intuitions. When people think of income inequality, they typically have several reactions ranging from focusing on the political implications to focusing on their own struggles. People often think of income inequality as “a shame.” This intuition is interesting. From the surface it seems logical, we want everyone to be doing well in life. However, many of us want to reach “the top” or to win. To win implies that someone has lost, or at the very least, won less. In other words, the intuition to win contradicts the want for equality.

This seems impossible, one intuition must be correct, so which one?

First, let’s analyze the idea that people think it’s “a shame” that income inequality exists. Going back to the work of Shigehiro Oishi, we can dig into this intuition. In a paper that focused on income inequality and happiness, Oishi looked at the United States over a 50-year time period and analyzed years where income inequality was substantially smaller. In these years, he found that, while controlling for other variables, the lower 40% of earners had higher Subjective Well Being (SWB). This was compounded by the fact that the highest 20% of earners did not see lower SWB. For the purposes of this blog, we can correlate SWB with happiness and more positive mental health outcomes (Oishi, 2018). This means that at times when people were more equal (from an income standpoint) they were also happier. The mechanism of trust explains this correlation.

In another paper, Oishi explains that “[as] predicted, Americans perceived others to be less fair and trustworthy in the years with greater income disparity, and this perception, in turn, explained why Americans reported lower levels of happiness in those years” (Oishi, 2011, pp. 1097).

Figure 3 taken from Oishi 2011. Cited below.

From this, it is reasonable to conclude that income inequality, by way of decreasing trust as well as perceived fairness, results in lower societal happiness. In other words, our intuition is correct.

Now let’s move on to our second intuition – the intuition to win or be competitive. This intuition implies that we need inequality as without it no one could win.

An economic study that analyzed competitiveness among both men and women, as a product of income, found that people were biologically rewarded for winning. This same study found that “the activity in reward-related brain areas not only positively correlates with higher absolute incomes but also negatively correlates with lower relative incomes” (Dohmen, 2011). This means that people want to win. They are also happier when they win (as a result of the “reward-related brain areas”). These biological tendencies match many of the core tenants of Capitalism, which emphasizes a meritocracy in its purest form. In this meritocracy, the “best” performer will win. This leads to incentives to win, as well as a belief that the “winners” are the ones with the most money. This combination of biology and market system doesn’t just lead to income inequality, it directly furthers it.

This leaves us with an interesting paradox. We need to find a way to reconcile these seemingly juxtaposed truths.

A great way to do this is to reframe them. Let’s think of them as short-term and long-term intuitions. As people, we live with seemingly contradictory intuitions all the time. I would love to binge-watch a new show every day, but I know that I will be happier in the long run if I am more productive. On a smaller scale, I would be absolutely elated to eat an entire cake for dinner tonight, but I would feel like utter garbage tomorrow. Our current problem is no different, a lot more abstract, but no different. I want to win in the short run as a result of both my genetic code and the economic system I function in. However, in the long run, I want society to be happier, because, at the end of the day, if we live in an untrusting and unhappy society, we are less likely to be happy ourselves.

The research shows that we should do our best to avoid income inequality, for the sake of the happiness of society. This is regardless of our short-term “winning” intuitions. Of course, we need to make our money to survive, but the intuition that others must lose is simply short sited. Just like many of our short-term feedback loops they come back to bite us in modern society with everything from overeating, to drug addiction, to -yes- income inequality. A key takeaway from the studies was that more income equality doesn’t lead to less happiness for the top earners, just more happiness for the less fortunate.

Citations (if people would like to learn more about the above topics, they can use the following papers)

Diener, Oishi, S., & Lucas, R. E. (2003). Personality, Culture, and Subjective Well-being: Emotional and Cognitive Evaluations of Life. Annual Review of Psychology, 54(1), 403–425. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.psych.54.101601.145056

Dohmen, & Falk, A. (2011). Performance Pay and Multidimensional Sorting: Productivity, Preferences, and Gender. The American Economic Review, 101(2), 556–590. https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.101.2.556

Hagerty. (2000). Social comparisons of income in one’s community: Evidence from national surveys of income and happiness. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78(4), 764–771. https://doi.org/10.1037//0022-3514.78.4.764

Oishi, S., Kesebir, S., & Diener, E. (2011). Income inequality and happiness. Psychological science, 22(9), 1095-1100.

Oishi, S., Kushlev, K., & Schimmack, U. (2018). Progressive Taxation, Income Inequality, and Happiness. The American Psychologist, 73(2), 157–168. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0000166

Impacts of Interpersonal Relationships

This will be the first of this series of blog posts, focusing on interpersonal relationships and their impact on mental health. I will be posting a new piece every two weeks. My motivation for writing these blog posts comes from literature research that I have done both within Psychology and Molecular Biology. I have come to realize that there is an enormous amount of interesting research that most people just don’t know about. This is largely a result of it being written in very technical language and being published in journals that the general public doesn’t read.

Importantly, every post will be APA cited, and every point will be supported by a paper. I am excited to take anyone that is interested on my journey of understanding interesting and relevant psychological research.

Trust: Why Should We Care?

In this post, I am going to dive into some of the research on trust and demonstrate the importance of trust both in society and between people.

First, let’s start with a definition of trust. Shigehiro Oishi, a distinguished researcher in the world of trust and happiness, described trust as the comfort that people will be honest with you. He specifically describes the absence of trust as such that “you can’t be too careful in dealing with people” (Oishi, 2011, pp. 1096).

While this is reasonably intuitive, it is significant due to trust’s relationship with happiness. An important study found that when Americans thought of others as less trustworthy, they described themselves as less happy (Preacher, Zyphur, and Zhang, 2010). It is important to note that this was a yearly analysis, so the data could have confounding variables, but this research establishes that there is clear correlation between trust and happiness.

Another study replicated the association between trust and happiness, and this one involved over 8,000 people. In this case, trust is correlated with good health as opposed to happiness, however, it is reasonable to say that health and happiness go hand-in-hand. The study concluded that “high levels of … trust and reciprocity had statistically significant associations with good self-rated health, even after adjusting for all the other variables” (Neiminen, 2010).

The big question and the purpose of this blog is “Why does this matter?” There are a few reasons. First, I think that we can all agree that being happier is a positive, if, at times, hedonistic. Second, and perhaps more importantly, trust may be causally associated with good health. We don’t know for sure, but it seems that correlation does imply some level of causation in this case. This means that being more trusting is good for us. It is beneficial to live in a society that has higher levels of trust.

Right now, it is safe to say that we don’t live in that society. There are several ways to fix this on the societal level, and the next few blog posts will discuss potential solutions. A good place to start is by making day-to-day choices. I am not a life coach, nor do I aspire to be, but the formula depicted by the research above is simple. Increased trust could lead to higher levels of happiness and potentially even longevity. How does one go about increasing trust in our fellow humans? For me, it starts with surrounding myself with good people. A good way to test this is to go back to Shigehiro Oishi’s quote and ask if you feel like you need to be careful when dealing with the people around you. If you feel like you can’t be too careful, then you are likely not in nor cultivating a trusting environment.

While many of these studies are from a decade or more ago, there have been more recent studies. I have these cited in the references section. I chose the above studies because they were more general. As the research has gone on, it has become more specific.

Citations (if people would like to learn more about the above topics they can use the following papers)

Delhey, J., & Dragolov, G. (2014). Why inequality makes Europeans less happy: The role of distrust, status anxiety, and perceived conflict. European sociological review, 30(2), 151-165.

Hagerty, M. R. (2000). Social comparisons of income in one’s community: Evidence from national surveys of income and happiness. Journal of Personality and social Psychology, 78(4), 764.

Nieminen, T., Martelin, T., Koskinen, S., Aro, H., Alanen, E., & Hyyppä, M. T. (2010). Social capital as a determinant of self-rated health and psychological well-being. International Journal of Public Health, 55(6), 531-542.

Oishi, S., Kesebir, S., & Diener, E. (2011). Income inequality and happiness. Psychological science, 22(9), 1095-1100.

Preacher, K. J., Zyphur, M. J., & Zhang, Z. (2010). A general multilevel SEM framework for assessing multilevel mediation. Psychological methods, 15(3), 209.

Tokuda, Y., Fujii, S., & Inoguchi, T. (2017). Individual and country-level effects of social trust on happiness: The Asia barometer survey. In Trust with Asian Characteristics (pp. 123-139). Springer, Singapore.

Comming Soon

As a scientist, I find it important to read and keep up on peer-reviewed research in all aspects. As a result of this belief, I have begun working on a literature research project with the University of Arizona, relating to mental health. I will be posting bi-weekly blog posts relating to Mental Health research. Starting in 2 weeks. If you are interested, please connect with me on linked-in, and bookmark my website.

Introduction

Growing up in Tucson, I developed a love for the desert, writing, and science, particularly Biology and Psychology. I have graduated with my degree in Molecular and Cellular Biology from the University of Arizona. I am grateful that I have been able to gain experience as a technical writer, back-end web designer, and researcher. I am excited to grow my business as a technical writer with both clients in Tucson, Chicago, and abroad.