The Welfare Trait

How State Benefits Affect Personality

Adam Perkins

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137555298
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The welfare state has a problem: each generation living under its protection has lower work motivation than the previous one. In order to fix this problem we need to understand its causes, lest the welfare state ends up undermining its own economic and social foundations. In The Welfare Trait, award-winning personality researcher Dr Adam Perkins argues that welfare-induced personality mis-development is a significant part of the problem. In support of his theory, Dr Perkins presents data showing that the welfare state can boost the number of children born into disadvantaged households, and that childhood disadvantage promotes the development of an employment-resistant personality profile, characterised by aggressive, antisocial and rule-breaking tendencies. The book concludes by recommending that policy should be altered so that the welfare state no longer increases the number of children born into disadvantaged households. It suggests that, without this change, the welfare state will erode the nation's work ethic by increasing the proportion of individuals in the population who possess an employment-resistant personality profile, due to exposure to the environmental influence of disadvantage in childhood.

1

What Is Personality and Why Does the Welfare State Matter?

In October 1833, a young English biologist travelling in South America mused in his journal about the factors that influence the success of a nation, concluding ‘a republic cannot succeed till it contains a certain body of men imbued with the principles of justice and honour’. That biologist was Charles Darwin, and in his journal entry he touched upon a resource that is now recognised as exerting a significant influence on the prosperity of a nation, namely human capital. The notion of human capital is a broad one, encompassing a nation’s stock of skills and knowledge. But its end result is narrower, being the capacity to carry out labour that produces economic value.

The welfare state has long been viewed as a threat to human capital, owing to concerns that providing unemployed citizens with a guaranteed income may discourage them from working for a living (Beveridge, 1942). Scandinavian economists have led the way in attempts to define these concerns. For example, almost 20 years ago, the eminent Swedish economist Assar Lindbeck warned that ‘the supply of benefits creates its own demand. Indeed, moral hazard and cheating are, in my judgement, the weak spot of the welfare state’ (Lindbeck, 1995, p. 2).

Lindbeck’s fears have since been supported empirically by studies showing that generous welfare states do indeed erode the ethical standards of citizens, much as he predicted. For example, the Nobel Prize-winning economist James Heckman summarised this literature as follows:

Participation in generous welfare states leads to erosion of the work ethic and withdrawal from participation in the social compact. There is evidence of cohort drift in welfare participation. Those cohorts who have lived a greater fraction of their lives under the generosity of the welfare state come to accept its benefits and game the system at higher rates.

(Heckman, 2008, p. 20)

The biological literature also urges caution: in his seminal 1976 book The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins described the welfare state as perhaps the greatest example of altruism in the animal kingdom but warned of its self-destructive potential. Viewed together with the economic studies conducted in Scandinavia, Dawkins’ warning therefore provides credible grounds for believing that we need to be vigilant as to the self-destructive tendencies of the welfare state. However, in order to protect the welfare state from itself, we must first understand the mechanisms that cause it to erode human capital so that we can implement amendments that preserve its good points but ameliorate its weaknesses.

One potentially important discovery is that the welfare state can boost the number of children born into disadvantaged households. For example, research in the UK has shown that for every 3 per cent rise in the generosity of benefits, the number of children born to claimants rises by approximately 1 per cent (Brewer, Ratcliffe & Smith, 2011). Moreover, this association between benefit generosity and reproductive behaviour appears to be causal, because follow-up interviews found that claimants discontinued contraception in response to increased generosity of benefits.

The importance of this discovery to the human capital debate is that childhood disadvantage has been shown in randomised controlled experiments – the gold standard of scientific proof – to promote the formation of an aggressive, antisocial and rule-breaking personality profile that impairs occupational and social adjustment during adulthood (Heckman, Pinto & Savelyev, 2013). A welfare state that increases the number of children born into disadvantaged households therefore risks increasing the number of citizens who develop an aggressive, antisocial and rule-breaking personality profile due to being exposed to disadvantage during childhood. Because this personality profile impairs occupational and social adjustment, its proliferation constitutes a potent and direct mechanism by which the welfare state can erode the human capital of the population from generation to generation.

Children are the future of our society and so the possibility that the ostensibly altruistic institution of the welfare state can damage their personality development – and thus their human capital – is a worrying one. I am a personality researcher by profession, and in this book, I examine the scientific literature in an attempt to evaluate the capacity of the welfare state to damage personality development.

First, in the chapter entitled ‘The Employment-Resistant Personality Profile’, we shall see evidence that the type of personality profile which tends to be developed by childhood disadvantage – an aggressive, antisocial and rule-breaking predisposition – is the same personality profile that is associated with impaired occupational performance across most of the employment spectrum. In line with this finding, we shall also see evidence that people with this personality profile are over-represented amongst welfare claimants. For this reason, I have dubbed it the ‘employment-resistant’ personality profile and formalise it as consisting of significantly below average scores on the personality dimensions of conscientiousness and agreeableness. As we shall see, these dimensions are well established in the scientific literature and are used by modern personality researchers to measure individual differences in aggressive, antisocial and rule-breaking tendencies.

These data leave unanswered the question of whether the employment-resistant personality profile is the cause rather than the product of unsatisfactory occupational outcomes. For example, it might be the case that adverse occupational circumstances reduce motivation to behave conscientiously and agreeably, which in turn worsens the individual’s chances of gaining and keeping employment. In Chapter 3 – ‘The Lifelong Impact of Personality’ – we address this issue by examining studies that record personality characteristics in childhood and then trace their effects on adult life, whilst controlling for the effect of other important variables such as intelligence and parental socio-economic status (SES). These studies suggest that the employment-resistant personality profile is indeed the cause rather than product of negative occupational outcomes because the less conscientious and agreeable a child’s personality profile, the worse they tend to do as adults in the world of work, despite their intelligence or social background.

A key conclusion in Chapter 3 is that the employment-resistant personality profile doesn’t just impair workplace performance – it also increases the frequency of behaviour that is likely to impair the life chances of the next generation (for example, teenage parenthood). This is a crucial finding because it suggests that individuals with employment-resistant personality characteristics not only suffer impaired life outcomes, but also transmit that difficulty to their children and thus risk damaging the life chances of the next generation. But what role could the welfare state play in this undesirable life trajectory?

In Chapter 4 – ‘The Influence of Benefits on Claimant Reproduction’ – we shall see that the number of children born to welfare claimants tracks the generosity of benefits, with increases in the generosity of welfare benefits being followed by deliberate increases in their rate of reproduction via altered contraception usage. Furthermore, we shall see evidence that this effect is likely to be driven primarily by claimants who possess the employment-resistant personality profile, since epidemiological studies show that this personality profile is, in general, associated with having more children. In this chapter, we shall also see evidence that the employment-resistant personality profile is associated with financial irresponsibility, since such parents do not tend to manage their welfare benefits conscientiously to improve the lot of their children, but instead tend to waste the money on unnecessary purchases.

In Chapter 5 – ‘Childhood Disadvantage and Employment-Resistance’ – we shall see that the disadvantage suffered by children of welfare claimants is not only a matter of financial irresponsibility but also a matter of parental style: despite having more free time, welfare claimants tend to speak to their children significantly less often than employed parents do. This finding suggests that the personality characteristics which make an individual an unsatisfactory employee also make them less likely to give their children the verbal and social investment that is required to develop a pro-employment personality profile. This finding is consistent with the notion that dysfunctional personality characteristics are transmitted from parents to offspring via an environmental route. However, the existence of individuals who grew up in privileged families with diligent, nurturing parents, yet nevertheless turned out to be adults with the employment-resistant personality profile, gives us a clue that the transmission of personality characteristics from parent to child cannot be explained by environmental factors alone.

In Chapter 6 – ‘Genetic Influences on Personality’ – we shall see evidence that the missing link in the transmission of personality characteristics from parent to child is genetic, as parents exert a genetic influence on the personality profiles of their offspring. Key evidence of this type is provided by experiments that show personality traits in populations of non-human animals can be significantly altered by selective breeding. These experiments point to a genetic basis for personality and are backed up by cross-breeding experiments which show that the offspring of two strains of animals with opposite behavioural tendencies will typically display behaviour that is intermediate between the two parental strains.

However, concerns exist that psychological models created using non-human animals (for example, rodents) are too simple to be valid in humans. The demonstration of a genetic influence on personality in non-human animals therefore does not necessarily apply to humans. Moreover, in practice, genetic effects will act in combination with environmental effects and so analysing genetic effects in isolation lacks realism. In Chapter 7 – ‘Personality as a Product of Nature and Nurture’ – we examine research aimed at comparing genetic and environmental influences on human personality and see evidence that the more closely related two people are, the more similar their personalities tend to be. This echoes the non-human experimental data on the genetic basis of personality and suggests that such data do, after all, have relevance to humans. However, we will also see that genetically identical individuals (monozygotic twins) do not have identical personality profiles, showing that both nature and nurture influence personality development.

Chapters 5–7 show that, because human personality is a product of nature and nurture (and their interplay), the children of employment-resistant welfare claimants are not only disadvantaged through a greater likelihood of being neglected, but also by a higher risk of inheriting the genes for the employment-resistant personality profile, compared to children born to adults with a pro-employment personality profile. Therefore, a welfare state which boosts the number of children born to claimants risks undermining human capital by causing an increased incidence of personality mis-development. More specifically, such a welfare state will cause proliferation of the employment-resistant personality profile via both environmental and genetic channels. I dub this idea the ‘welfare trait’ theory.

In Chapter 8 – ‘A Model of How the Welfare State Leads to Personality Mis-Development’ – I build on these foundations by using a statistical model to obtain a quantitative estimate of the scale of welfare-induced personality mis-development. This may seem to be an impossible task given the bewildering array of variables involved, but, due to what is known as the normal distribution, we can insert certain key numbers into this demographic model and obtain an estimate of the size of the transforming effect of a certain level of welfare generosity on personality, as well as its approximate monetary cost.

In Chapter 9 – ‘Further Evidence for Welfare-Induced Personality Mis-Development’ – I summarise evidence that is circumstantial but nevertheless consistent with the notion that the welfare state is changing the developmental trajectory of the personality profile of the population towards greater employment-resistance. For example, we shall see that the introduction of the welfare state amongst the nations of the Western world has been followed by a substantial decrease in work motivation and an upsurge in criminal violence. This rise in criminal violence that followed the introduction of the welfare state in the Western world could be coincidental, but it is what we would expect to see if the welfare trait theory is valid because criminal violence is associated with employment-resistant personality characteristics.

In Chapter 10 – ‘What Next?’ – I argue that to prevent the welfare state proliferating the employment-resistant personality profile, the generosity of benefits must be adjusted so that the average number of children in workless households falls to a level that is approximately equal to that in working households. But I also argue that the greatest obstacle to amending the welfare state so that it does not cause personality mis-development is not a lack of scientific knowledge: after all, much of the evidence upon which this book is based has been published for decades and the eminent biologist Richard Dawkins warned presciently in 1976 of the personality-related dangers of the welfare state. In my opinion, the greatest obstacle to correcting the welfare state is a lack of will amongst the governing elite in previous decades to face up to this issue. I conclude the book by tracing this lack of will to the tendency of the governing elite to live in geographically and intellectually sheltered enclaves that mean they are out of touch with life in ordinary neighbourhoods, where the ill effects of welfare-induced personality mis-development are most apparent.

However, before we launch into the empirical content of the book, I will finish this introductory chapter with a brief summary of some basic concepts in personality research, as well as some comments on the scientific method. This end piece is primarily for the benefit of readers who are not familiar with personality as a topic of scientific research, but also serves to put the theme of this book in its proper scientific context.

First, we need a definition of personality. Creating definitions of personality is a popular hobby for researchers, leading to a sometimes confusing plethora of terms and phrases. But what most of these definitions have in common is the notion that personality refers to patterns of emotion, thought and behaviour that represent stable and lasting differences between individuals. So if we have a colleague who is a worrier in job-related situations, they are also likely to be a worrier when it comes to their private life. Moreover, that person is likely to have been a worrier as a child and is also likely to be a worrier when they become a senior citizen. This definition of personality does not rule out dramatic changes in a person’s disposition following a traumatic experience, as in the old joke that a conservative is just a liberal who has been mugged. But it means that, on average, when we trace an individual’s habitual pattern of emotion, thought and behaviour over their lifetime, we are able to observe regularities; that is, their personality profile.

This leads us to a second key concept, which is that personality is measureable. This is essential, because in order to observe regularities in personality from year to year or to compare personality to applied criteria such as job performance, we must be able to measure it. This can be accomplished by observing behaviour during an experiment, or obtaining reports from people who know the individual (for example, parents, teachers or colleagues). But by far the most convenient and widely used means of measuring personality is the self-report questionnaire, in which the respondent is asked to say how well a series of items applies to them. These items usually consist of personality-related adjectives (for example, talkative) or phrases (for example, I like to attend lively parties) and the participant typically indicates how well the item applies to them using a numerical response scale (for example, 1 = not at all, 2 = slightly, 3 = somewhat, 4 = very much).

As a supplement for this book, I have created an online personality questionnaire that you can use to measure your own personality. The home page is www.measureyourpersonality.com and you can access the questionnaire by entering the study code 92556379. This questionnaire divides the domain of personality into five dimensions, which is the current industry standard model of personality, often known as the ‘Big Five’ (for example, Digman, 1990; Costa & McCrae, 1992; Goldberg, 1993). This does not mean that other models of personality are incorrect or that there are only five dimensions of personality – it simply means that for most practical purposes, five dimensions have been proven to provide a useful and valid approximation of human personality. The ‘Big Five’ dimensions of personality are extraversion, conscientiousness, agreeableness, neuroticism and openness to experience.

Extraversion reflects engagement with the external world, especially engagement with people. Individuals who score high on this trait (often labelled as extraverts) typically enjoy being with people, are usually full of energy and experience frequent positive emotions. They also tend to be enthusiastic, action-oriented individuals who are likely to say ‘Yes!’ or ‘Let’s go!’ to opportunities for excitement. In groups, they like to talk, assert themselves and draw attention to themselves and so excel in occupations that require frequent face-to-face interaction with the general public. Extraverts do however run the risk of appearing somewhat overpowering and even irritating owing to their talkative manner.

Individuals who score low in the lower range on extraversion (often labelled as introverts) typically have a rich internal life and need less stimulation form the external world than more extraverted individuals do. Introverts therefore tend to come across as quiet, low-key, deliberate and disengaged from the social world. Their lack of social involvement should not however be interpreted as shyness or depression; the introvert simply needs less stimulation than an extravert does and thus usually prefers to be alone or with one or two other people. The independence and reserve of the introvert should not be mistaken as unfriendliness or arrogance, as although the introvert does not usually seek out others, he or she will usually be quite pleasant when approached. Introverts excel in occupations that require lengthy periods of concentration with few other people around, such as radar operation or writing.

Conscientiousness reflects the extent to which we focus on detail and manage our affairs in a self-disciplined manner. Individuals scoring high on this trait come across as careful, cautious, planning, dutiful and detail-minded. They are typically focused on achievement and are capable of working consistently and patiently towards long-term goals. High scorers on conscientiousness do not tend to rush into decisions or actions. This steady, meticulous persona means that high scorers on conscientiousness tend to excel in occupations, such as the law or accountancy, which require considerable attention to detail and an ability to make sensible decisions that require a sober and prudent deliberation of all the facts of a matter.

Low scorers on conscientiousness are typically impulsive and tend to skip over detail, preferring instead to focus on the bigger picture. They also tend to make quick and seemingly intuitive decisions, even on big matters such as which job to take or which house to buy. When attempting to learn a new skill, low scorers on conscientiousness will tend not to apply themselves in a steady, efficient manner and thus will usually acquire only a shallow, superficial gras...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1. What Is Personality and Why Does the Welfare State Matter?
• 2. The Employment-Resistant Personality Profile
• 3. The Lifelong Impact of Personality
• 4. The Influence of Benefits on Claimant Reproduction
• 5. Childhood Disadvantage and Employment-Resistance
• 6. Genetic Influences on Personality
• 7. Personality as a Product of Nature and Nurture
• 8. A Model of How the Welfare State Leads to Personality Mis-Development
• 9. Further Evidence for Welfare-Induced Personality Mis-Development
• 10. What Next?
• References
• Index