People Support Social Welfare When They're Hungry Themselves - Olga Khazan - The Atlantic - 0 views
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Obamacare will, in some form or another, redistribute wealth.
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Our upbringing, background, and wealth clearly influence whether we support redistributive policies, but interesting new research shows that, when it comes to supporting social welfare programs, not just our ideologies, but our physiologies, play a role.
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past research has actually shown that Republicans and Democrats have striking similar ideas of how wealth should be distributed.
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early man regularly experienced hunger, and when times were especially lean, he had to convince other group members to share their bounty.
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foundations of social welfare attitudes in an unusual place: among our hunter-gatherer ancestors
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To the authors, this indicated that the hungrier subjects were, essentially, bigger fans of sharing society’s resources, and they wanted to remind others about the importance of redistribution.
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That is, the hungrier people liked the idea of encouraging others to share, but they didn’t actually want to be the ones doing the sharing
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ast studies from the same authors have also shown that people who are in a physically weaker situation tend to support wealth redistribution. Voters were more likely to be supportive of welfare policies if they were asked before lunchtime, as opposed to after, for example. Among rich men, those with smaller biceps were more likely to be open to wealth redistribution. (The opposite was true for poor men).
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Granted, these studies were small, and they were performed in Denmark, which already has a more generous social welfare net that the U.S. does, so they can’t be applied directly.