Cognitive biases and class consciousness

Dave, Neal and Galloway, in their different ways, all want a return to class-based politics. Which raises an interesting question. Why is there so little working-class consciousness today?

By working class, I don’t of course mean men with flat ‘ats and whippets. If you need to work for a living, and your employment depends upon the decision of a boss, you are working class.

So why don’t people realize this? It’s not as if they think money unimportant to their lives. And there’s plenty of evidence (pdf) that job insecurity is high even in stable economies.

Traditionally, this question provokes illiterate mumbo-jumbo from Marxists: false consciousness, hegemony, the masses, drone, drone.

However, we don’t need such gibberish to explain the lack of class consciousness. Orthodox cognitive biases do the job just as well. Here are five that stop people realizing their class position:

1. Wishful thinking. People think they are luckier or more skillful than the average. So they underestimate their chances of being made redundant, and over-estimate their chances of promotion. Just watch Pop Idol or the Apprentice – people of no account whatsoever think they can rise out of their class. And why do think people do the lottery?

2. Illusion of control. People think they can control their fate even when they can’t. And if you think you’re in charge of your life, you won’t feel the need for class solidarity or a strong trades union to help you.

3. Fundamental attribution error. We tend to attribute events to conscious, direct, individual behaviour more than to subtle environmental forces. This can depress class consciousness in two ways. If someone is unsuccessful – say they lose their job or don’t get promoted – we over-attribute this to their incompetence rather than to situational factors: it’s a necessity of the (capitalist?) economy that millions of people do lose their jobs or miss out on promotion through no fault of their own. Secondly, it means we overly believe that bosses deserve their position, rather than got it through luck.

4. Halo effect. We naturally think that all good individual qualities are correlated; the movie heroes are better looking and better shots than the baddies. This leads us to believe that the rich are more virtuous than others. This effect can be reinforced by the salience effect. Rich people attract more attention than poor ones. And the egocentric attribution bias leads them to claim that the key to their success was hard work.. This causes us to believe not only that they deserve their position, but also that we can emulate their success if we work hard too, and that the poor owe their position to a lack of hard work.

5. Just world effect:

We like to believe we live in a just, fair world and, therefore, we do feel that we live in a just, fair world. In order to defend this fragile belief, we twist our perceptions of others and reinterpret past events. This requires considerable self-delusion in our sometimes capricious society.

These are not the only mechanisms explaining the lack of class consciousness. Another one is that the hierarchical capitalist economy is regarded as natural simply because alternatives to it are so rarely described.

All I’m saying is that the lack of class politics can be explained by conventional social science.

Comments

[Luis Enrique]

"If you need to work for a living, and your employment depends upon the decision of a boss, you are working class."

Man, that's a relief. I thought I was middle class, and everybody hates the middle class, most of all the middle class themselves. So, me and all my organic food munching public school educated handsomely salaried chums are working class? Sorted. Salt of the earth.

[Colman]

Where do you fit the middle class in? Who's in that box?

We're confused by that over on ET...

[chris]

Middle class in the economic sense corresponds to what Erik Olin Wright called a contradictory class location, someone with a foot in both camps. This encompasses some lower level bosses or workers who could, at a pinch, afford to retire and so are not wholly dependent upon wages. This includes many City folk and (almost) me.
"Middle class" in the cultural sense means "ponce."

[Luis Enrique]

watch it pal or some of my middle class pals will duff you up

NB your defition is crazy talk, ain't no way I could afford to retire at any sort of pinch, but ain't no way that I'm anything other than a big fat middle class captialist running dog smug etc. etc. pour-out-your-hatred-here swine.

[Charlie Whitaker]

Well yes, a lot of people are delusional - sorry, optimistic.

There's more than one dynamic at work here, though, surely. What do you make of Commonwealth citizens on working holiday visas? Working class? They certainly make up a good part of the labour force in my company, and they're all self-employed. And just when you think they're susceptible to exploitation, they take off for a six month holiday somewhere. No one would call them rich, but they do exercise choice.

And then there are professionals / consultants in general. Barristers are all technically self-employed. Many doctors can be if they wish, or they can at least do a proportion of their work for private clients. Most professionals can choose between being their own boss or taking a salary: it's a judgement they'll make after taking into account the merits of each situation.

Are illegal immigrant workers working class? I suspect they couldn't join a union even if they wished to.

I certainly don't mean to paint a rosy picture - if wealth inequality is high, then exploitation will surely tend to match - but there's arguably more complexity in the world's labour market than there once was.

[Lark]

I think class consciousness is a haggard, dated notion from years ago when the ascendency of one class or another was taken to be the curtain call for class divisions or distinctions altogether,

I've been to places where people on middle class income scales or professionals insist they are "still working class", why is the prestige associated with any single class when we are meant to be aiming for a classless society?

I would think it is more socialistic to have no class consciousness, to be a true individual instead of a product of your background, status, neighbourhood etc.

[matt]

The very enriching experience of (class consciousness) happens i suspect, long before a person hears of it or reads of it. It happens during those "states" of honesty-when parental and institutional advice is ignored. It happens when one ignores the childish impulse of self interest. To me, it happens in stages, it takes awhile to undo the propoganda, what whith a brutal mortgage to pay and mouths to feed, not much time for honest reflection, Im 50 and still fighting the effects-Yeah!!!! it takes that long!! Oh well,lets take avantage of the increase in life expectancy, there is more of a chance that the busy illusion will fade and we will "get it", class consciousness that is?.