Tess Wilkinson-Ryan studies the psychology of legal decision-making at the University of Pennsylvania. Her work contributes to our understanding of our fear of being a taken for a fool. This post is about how that fear might affect programs and supports for people who are homeless as well as people who are struggling to hang on to their housing.
Wilkinson-Ryan leads us through research in economics and psychology, where decision making and the fear of being taken for a fool has been studied extensively. Economists have studied choices about investment decisions. Their findings indicate that trust is a factor in decision-making.
Psychology contributes by looking at how trust works. If you trust someone and the results aren’t what you expect, you will be wary about decisions that require trust in the future. When there is more than one experience like this, we learn to be wary of trusting generally. And to manage risk, we narrow the field of who we trust. No one wants to be taken for a fool.
Wilkinson-Ryan adds on to this research by showing how the fear of being taken for a fool feeds a view that people are motivated by self-interest. She contends that from this starting point, it becomes much harder to support and sustain efforts that reduce inequalities for disadvantaged groups. Programs that reduce inequalities shift to become seen as ‘special favours.’ Wilkinson-Ryan describes it this way:
“If members of a marginalised social group are seen as genuinely asking for equality, then they are making a deep moral claim that’s hard to dismiss. Morally and intuitively, the right response to inequality is solidarity and cooperation.
“But if those people are instead perceived as asking for “special favours”, then it seems morally optional to grant what they want. And if they are thought to be asking for special treatment but pretending they only want equality, that just seems like a scam, a reason to reject them out of hand.”
In the context of homelessness, there is certainly a view that people who are homeless should be able to fix their situation on their own: they don’t deserve special treatment. Wilkinson-Ryan’s article may be helpful in understanding where this view comes from and why it is held so deeply. It may also shed light on calls for encampment sweeps and our collective non-effort to ensure that there is an adequate supply of affordable decent housing. Read more in The Guardian: ‘Wait, am I the fool here?’: why our fears of being scammed are corrosive and damaging
