This is a guest post by L. P., whose psychological insights are a welcome addition to this blog.
Looking back, I realize that the ideological difference, and the different societal roles that we envisioned for ourselves, arose from our different motives for choosing to study psychology, and from our temperaments as they relate to motives. The left-leaning psychologists I've come to know chose psychology because they wanted to help individuals or improve humanity as a whole. I chose psychology because I only wanted to understand people but didn't have the foggiest idea what I wanted to ultimately do this knowledge, if anything at all.
Temperament was likely at the root of why my peers regard helping behavior with starry-eyed Pollyanna simplicity as well. In contrast, I'd envision how good can come out of doing nothing and how negative consequences result from intervention, thus justifying my unwillingness to get off my duff to lend a hand. Who would've thought that laziness can open up your mind in ways do-goodery does not?
I can't quantify the negative impact that institutionalized assistance has had on people it purports to help. But the prevailing focus on the positive effects of do-goodery ensures that its negative effects are overlooked.
To understand how help can perpetuate conditions it purports to alleviate, the question, "Why do individuals, groups or organizations apply themselves to helping other people, groups or countries?" must be considered in greater depth. Theo N.M. Schuyt mentions a few darker motives: helpers' own fear and helplessness (e.g, fear of those they are helping), self-interest, and the need for social control. Schuyt discusses these motives at length in "The Magnetism of Power in Helping Relationships. Professional Attitude and Asymmetry," Social Work and Society International Online Journal Vol. 2, No. 1 (2004).
To fully appreciate how help can hinder people, we must examine the subtle but influential negative assumptions that underlie the act of helping others and the messages received by those who are helped. Research articles by Francesca D'Errico, Giovanna Leone, and Isabella Poggi about teachers who overhelp their students are informative in this regard. Although they must be purchased to view in their entirety, the previews support my view as to how helping reinforces negative self-evaluations of those in need; go here and here (click "Look Inside").
In conclusion, the manner in which overhelp negatively impacts social relationships and cognition has long been regarded as the reason why the poor stay poor. (See Schuyt, op. cit.) In the effort to convince everyday do-gooders who support this type of aid because of their own dysfunctional emotional states, however, it will be necessary to frame the information in a more palatable way. In this regard, D'Errico et al. offer a few key questions and guidelines for distinguishing between help that promotes empowerment and autonomy from help that encourages dependency.
1. Is the problem to be solved possible manageable by the helped one?
2. May a humiliating intention (vs. a caring one) be inferred from the helping behavior?
3. Do the consequences of the helping behavior increase (vs. decrease) the power asymmetry needed for the help to occur?
I see this as a starting point. What else can we do to dismantle the status of altruism and helping behavior as sacred cows? How else can we reframe the discussion in such a way that would encourage others to regard these issues with more objectivity? Any thoughts?
This entry was posted in Intelligence - Personality - Psychology, Leftism - Statism - Democracy and tagged altruism, helpers, helping, personality, poverty, psychology, self-interest, social capital, social control. Bookmark the permalink.
It's hard for a "helpful" person to see that (a) his help may be counterproductive and (b) based on a need to control rather than a genuine desire to help. The same is true even of persons who aren't leftists, as I realize when I look back on my management style from a distance of almost two decades.
Given the difficulty of real-time self-criticism and reflection, perhaps the best way to undermine the left's "helpful" agenda is to discourage it. One way of doing that is to publicize vigorously the negative consequences of that agenda. through blog posts like this one and articles and books in the vein of Please Stop Helping Us and Shame (both reviewed almost evenhandedly in the NYT: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/08/books/review/please-stop-helping-us-and-shame.html).
Yes, after a response I received about my post, I quickly realized how viewing "helping" in an objectified manner of an outsider studying human phenomena just isn't within everyone's capabilities (anymore than autistic people can employ perspective-taking as well as those with high cognitive empathy). They just believe that even if a leftist institution's assistance failed, that it was because of x, y, or z and think that they, as individuals, can muster up a renewed effort to help which makes *this* help different (and more effectual) than *that* help.
While exploring the different empathy pathways (cognitive vs. affective), I chanced upon the matter of there being a regulating mechanism that enables people to identify whether an emotion is coming from themselves or from someone else. It was quite the "Eureka!" moment for me because, until then, I wasn't able to pinpoint why people project feelings onto others or why they accept others emotional states as their own. This regulating mechanism isn't functioning in those people, and I think this plays a part in certain helpers' perception of situations and dysfunctional helping. Upon finding some written work about the possibility and desirability of making "less compassionate" people more compassionate with medication – so that they'll be more supportive of wealth redistribution, I think it's only fair to point out the egregious matter of this faulty regulating mechanism. This will be the subject of my next post.
Thank you for your post. I have a long been interested in the intersection of politics and psychology. Too often people counter one political agenda with another. That seems to me to be a mistake. Many political choices are pre-ideological. We cannot refute error unless we understand its source. I look forward to reading more!
Thanks for your feedback Matt! Indeed, learning that, in many cases, fear precedes liberals' empathetic response to help only recently helped me fully understand instances of hypocrisy.
Having lived in some of the most liberal locations in California and spent time with liberals, I'd notice phenomena like… here they are watching Rachel Maddow, Keith Olbermann, etc. while chatting about needing to help the poor for hours instead of working at a soup kitchen.
Fear being at the root of phenomena like these explains so much.
Thanks for providing these links (to the previous article above as well)! Yes, I agree that we need more compelling articles like these.
I'd also been thinking along the lines of needing more "laboratory" type studies to isolate the psychological impact of overhelp. This would help make it clear that the negative consequences are due to the help and not some other factor in our environment (for example, structural factors in the country being helped as one respondent claimed).