Are attitudes towards success, wealth accumulation and competition linked to feelings of individual agency?

People with strong feelings of agency feel that they have a great deal of choice and control over the way their lives turn out. As shown in the charts below, such people tend to have more positive attitudes toward hard work and success, wealth accumulation and competition. However, people who do not feel that they have a great deal of choice and control do not, in general, seem to be particularly cynical; they are just tend to be less positive than those with strong feelings of agency.


Readers who would like to know why I am considering questions such as this might find an answer in an earlier post.

The data used in this exercise are from the World Values Survey 2005-2008 which surveyed about 75, 000 people in 57 countries. The question concerning feelings of agency asks respondents how much freedom of choice and control they feel over the way their lives turn out. A rating of 1 means none at all and a rating of 10 means a great deal. The average rating is 7. Ratings of 1 to 4 are relatively uncommon and responses with those ratings have been aggregated in the charts shown below.

The first chart shows how responses relating to attitudes towards the relationship between hard work and success vary among people with stronger and weaker feelings of personal agency. The survey asks whether respondents agree with the statement ‘hard work brings success’. A rating of 1 means that ‘in the long run hard work usually brings a better life’, whereas a rating of 10 means that ‘hard work doesn’t bring success – it is more a matter of luck and connections’. Ratings have been aggregated in the chart to show the differences more clearly; ratings 1to3 have been labelled ‘positive’, ratings 4 to 7 have been labelled ‘mixed’ and ratings 8 to 10 have been labelled ‘negative’. The data in each of the charts add to 100% on the depth access (i.e. for each level of agency, the red, blue and green columns added together equal 100%) .

The second chart shows how responses related to attitudes toward wealth accumulation vary among people with different feelings of agency. The survey question asking about attitudes toward wealth accumulation specifies a rating of 1for agreement that ‘people can only get rich at the expense of others’ and 10 for agreement that ‘wealth can grow so there’s enough for everyone’. Ratings 1-3 have been labelled ‘negative’, ratings 4-7 have been labelled ‘mixed’ and ratings 8-10 have been labelled positive.

The third chart shows how responses related to attitudes toward competition vary with agency. The survey question specifies a rating of 1 for agreement that ‘competition is good; it stimulates people to work hard and develop new ideas’ and of 10 for agreement that ‘competition is harmful; it brings the worst in people’. Ratings have been aggregated and labelled as for the first chart.

The pattern shown in all three charts is fairly similar with people who have strong feelings of agency tending to have more positive attitude toward success from hard work, wealth accumulation and competition. This result was much as I had expected but I had thought the attitudes shown by people with relatively low agency might be somewhat more negative than they appear to be.

What do the results mean? Previous research has suggested that feelings of agency are related to the amount of freedom that people actually experience in their lives. The results suggest that people who feel a lot of freedom tend to have more positive attitudes toward success from hard work, wealth accumulation and competition.

Previous research suggests that people who have strong feelings of agency are not particularly selfish in their attitudes. I wonder whether that is also true of people who have positive attitudes toward wealth accumulation.

Postscript:
That question is followed up here and here.

Is Maslow's hierarchy of needs a pernicious doctrine?

I recently heard a distinguished economist claim that Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is a ‘totally pernicious doctrine’. He expressed a strong objection to the idea that ‘first you have to satisfy the body and, only when you have done this can you satisfy the spirit’. I will refrain from naming the individual and providing a link to his remarks because I am not sure that the comment represents his considered view. He might have just been intending to provoke further thought about Maslow’s theory.


Maslow presented his hierarchy of needs as a theory of motivation in a paper written in 1943. He suggested that a person who is lacking in food, safety, love and esteem would probably hunger for food more strongly than anything else. He hypothesized that humans are motivated by a hierarchy of needs, which they seek to satisfy in the following order: physiological, safety, love, esteem and self-realization. He acknowledged that the order of need gratification might not be as rigid as this ranking implies and that it was not necessary for a particular need to be entirely satisfied before a higher need emerged.

It seems to me that the idea at the core of Maslow’s theory is that gratification of the most basic needs releases a person to focus on higher needs. This idea of natural progression to satisfaction of higher needs is the opposite of extreme asceticism which implies that higher needs can only be met through denial of desire. There may also be some tension between Maslow’s view and the Buddhist view that gratification of desires can be addictive, as explained by Lam Goembo Dorji in a recent paper.

In testing Maslow’s theory it seems to me that the central issue is the extent to which people actually move on to satisfy higher needs as their incomes rise. Maslow’s theory should be rejected if most people do not respond to rising incomes by moving on to satisfy higher needs. It ought not to be rejected just because a few relatively enlightened people are able to flourish even though they have relatively low incomes.

A recent study by Louis Tay and Ed Diener tests Maslow’s theory using data from the Gallup World Poll as indicators of the needs identified by Maslow. The authors found some support for Maslow’s theory in that people tend to achieve basic and safety needs before other needs. They also found that fulfilling the various needs has relatively independent effects on subjective well-being, so humans can derive happiness by simultaneously working on a number of needs regardless of the fulfillment of other needs. (The paper, entitled ‘Needs and Subjective Well-Being Around the World’, JPSP (2011) can be obtained here, and Bridget Grenvill-Cleave has written a good summary here.)

There are some other posts on this blog that are relevant to the priority that people give to various needs. In a recent post I discussed evidence presented by Christian Welzel and Ronald Inglehart that as the contribution of greater financial satisfaction to overall life satisfaction has become ‘saturated’ to a greater extent with higher levels of economic development, people tend to achieve higher life satisfaction to a greater extent through activities that enhance feelings of agency.

In the post entitled ‘Does the law of diminishing returns apply to a level of achievement?’ I used Australian survey data to explain life satisfaction in terms of levels of satisfaction with seven domains: standard of living, health, safety, relationships, community connectedness, future security and achievement. Best fit was obtained from a linear function, suggesting that the various domains have independent effects on life satisfaction. However, satisfaction ratings in the various domains are correlated - for example, there is a relatively high correlation between satisfaction ratings for relationships and achieving.

In a related study (reported here) I attempted to identify whether high satisfaction in any particular domains of life are more necessary than others to high satisfaction with life as a whole. The criterion used was the percentage of respondents with high satisfaction with life as a whole among those with low ratings on particular domains of quality of life. The relevant percentages were follows (ranked in order of importance of each domain): personal relationships 10.8%, achieving in life 11.8%, standard of living 12.8%, future security 15.6%, health 15.9%, community connectedness 19.0% and safety 20.3%. The results suggest that satisfaction with personal relationships and achieving are more necessary to high life satisfaction of Australians than is satisfaction with standard of living and future security.

A post entitled ‘Are the world’s poor motivated solely by survival needs?’ discusses survey evidence about the ways very poor people spend their incomes. Surprisingly, they tend to spend a substantial proportion of their income on entertainment, suggesting that they are not motivated entirely by survival needs. The post discusses why this might be so and also why some wealthy people stay fixated at a materialistic level. The way people respond to experiences depends importantly on what those experiences mean to them. It is possible for wealthy people to feel deprivation and for poor people to feel that living means a lot more than meeting physiological needs.

So, where do I end up? I like the idea that self-realization is a fundamental human need that people seek to satisfy if they are able, but I don’t think gratification of desires is a particularly helpful frame of mind - individuals are more likely to realize their potential if they seek equanimity rather than pleasure. Yet, it seems obvious that human flourishing is not possible unless basic physiological needs to be met. I am impressed by the evidence that there is a general tendency for people to move on to satisfy other needs as their basic physiological needs are met. At the same time, there is plenty of evidence that some people achieve high levels of satisfaction with life at relatively low incomes and that some wealthy people are not satisfied with their high income levels. The extent to which people perceive increased economic opportunity as an opportunity to satisfy higher needs may be strongly influenced by culture, values, frames and beliefs.

Maslow may have been too simplistic in suggesting that gratification of the most basic needs releases a person to focus on higher needs, but that doesn’t mean his theory is a pernicious doctrine.

Should advertising be allowed in schools?

Nicola has sent me a message presenting the following views and providing links to a range of different web sites discussing the issues involved:

‘A school should be a simulating learning environment for our children. We trust our schools with our children to provide them with an opportunity to learn and grow. The school breaks this trust by allowing corporations to influence and manipulate their minds. As adults we have the ability to be critical of advertising, however, a school environment is one of trust, therefore, children are more likely to take the advertising at face value. Furthermore, the advertising appears to be endorsed by the school that heightens its power when compared to other contexts.

America has led the way on this form of advertising in schools. The present push by the major supermarkets to put advertising billboards on our school gates and in our schools in the form of voucher collectors is the first step. The use of TV screens with commercials and product placement in our classrooms is not far behind this. Is this the direction we want to take our education system and the welfare of our children?

There should be a blanket ban on advertising in schools as it exploits our children. In the interest of your children, please speak to your children's school management and lobby for the removal of banners and voucher collection.’

It seems to me that this is a matter that should be decided by parents’ organisations in individual schools. If parents think that some form of commercial sponsorship is an appropriate method of fund raising, why should I object?

However, there is probably no harm in expressing a personal view. In my view schools must be really desperate for ways to raise money to allow commercial organizations into schools to give prizes to kids for singing advertising jingles. What is the world coming to?

For further explanation of what Nicola is writing about, see this story in ‘The Australian’. There is a paper here discussing the methods of modern marketing being applied in schools.

Postsript:
I neglected to say that Nicola Moir is a Sydney artist.  The emphasis of her work is on what she describes as 'the forgotton spaces we inhabit between work, home and leisure' - 'the spaces where we come together as a community'. Her web site is well worth visiting. Among other things it might prompt you to consider whether you really are 'a happy little vegemite'. (For the benefit of non-Australians, the vegemite song is probably the most successful advertising jingle ever aimed at children in Australia.)

Would we be more satisfied with life if we lived in the best of all possible worlds?

How would we know if we lived in the best of all possible worlds? A possible world is not a perfect world. If we lived in the best possible world we would still be fallible humans. If you asked someone living in the best possible world how satisfied they are with their life it seems to me that they would be likely to look around at the lives that other people live and use that as the basis for their response. If Australia was the best of all possible worlds my guess is that average life satisfaction of Australians would not be much higher than their average life satisfaction has been over the last decade or so.


My point is not that life in Australia is close to the best possible, but that life satisfaction may not be a reliable indicator of whether our lives are getting better. If we lived in the best of all possible worlds, many of us would have greater opportunities than we have now and would take advantage of those opportunities to achieve better lives. However, since most of us would adapt fairly quickly to our new lives, average life satisfaction would not be much higher than it is now. We would readily acknowledge that our lives had improved, but our level of contentment would not be much greater.

Why do I think that? Well, take a look at the ABS web site showing Measures of Australia’s Progress. The picture presented there is of improvement in many aspects of well-being over the last decade, including health and education as well as income. The negative outcomes are in respect of environmental outcomes that tend not to be at the front or our minds when we think of our personal well-being. (In the best possible worlds our consciences might be more troubled by negative environmental impacts of our actions, but this would have led us to reduce such impacts.) On balance, the indicators suggest that the personal well-being of most Australians has improved substantially over the last decade.

Now, take a look at the chart below showing what has happened over the last decade to average life satisfaction and the personal well-being index produced by Australian Unity and the Australian Centre on Quality of Life. The life satisfaction rating is derived by asking respondents to give a rating from 0 to 10 in response to a single question: ‘Thinking about your own life and personal circumstances, how satisfied are you with your life as a whole?’ The personal well-being index is the average of satisfaction for a range of life domains including standard of living, health, achieving in life, personal relationships, feeling part of the community and future security.

Australians were apparently more satisfied with life than usual at the time of 2004 Olympics and less satisfied than usual during the onset of the global financial crisis, but there is not much change in either index over the decade as a whole. The same survey asks respondents how satisfied they are with the economic situation in Australia. Ratings of the economic situation fluctuate far more than the life satisfaction responses, but there is still not much evidence of an upward trend reflecting the growth in real income levels over the decade.

The chart also shows that ratings of the economic situation have fluctuated more or less in line with the consumer confidence index produced by Roy Morgan research. This consumer confidence index is constructed from answers to questions about current economic conditions and economic conditions over the next five years as well as family finances and whether or not this is a good time to buy major household items.

The following chart shows how responses to the question about economic conditions over the next five years have fluctuated in the recent past. Over the last year or so, a lot of us have tended to become more pessimistic about the economic outlook.

Fortunately, our satisfaction with our own lives does not fluctuate to the same extent as our assessments of the economic situation. Both types of measure have the same deficiency, however, as indicators of progress or regress. When we are asked to rate our own lives or the state of the economy we tend not to look back and reflect upon changes that have occurred unless we are asked explicitly to do so.

The Gallup World Poll asks respondents to rate their lives five years ago and five years ahead as well as their life today, all relative to the best possible life. The results provide an indication of whether survey respondents perceive that their lives are getting better. The average rating Australians give for their current life in 2011 is 7.4 and their rating of life in five years is 8.0 . In 2008, Australians rated their life five years previously at 6.8 . I don’t know why the data is so patchy, but it does suggest, nevertheless, that Australians perceive that their lives have improved over the last decade.