Mindsets

Motivation

In Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy, Robert Frank argues that wealthy people fail to appreciate the central role that luck plays in their success. He describes the cognitive biases that prevent successful people from appreciating the role that luck has played in their lives. For example, people find it harder to motivate themselves if they believe that luck has a bigger impact on their life than hard work.

Tim Harford has written about what psychologists call the ‘headwinds / tailwinds asymmetry’, based on the idea that a cyclist never notices when the wind is at his or her back.

Danny Dorling writes about how the Moneyball author Michael Lewis explained to a group of Princeton University graduates why most of his own and his audience’s success was due to luck:

People really don’t like to hear success explained away as luck – especially successful people. As they age, and succeed, people feel their success was somehow inevitable. They don’t want to acknowledge the role played by accident in their lives. There is a reason for this: the world does not want to acknowledge it either.

Status anxiety

Alain de Botton makes the following observation in his book Status Anxiety:

We care about our status for a simple reason: because most people tend to be nice to us according to the amount of status we have (it is no coincidence that the first question we tend to be asked by new acquaintances is ‘What do you do?’).

Gerry Mitchell and Marcos González Hernando write in Uncomfortably Off: Why the Top 10% of Earners Should Care about Inequality:

[High earners] are anxious about downward mobility - if not for themselves, for their children… Despite their relative advantage and comfort, they worry about their income, are anxious about the future and don’t feel politically empowered.

Mitchell and Hernando also cite Piketty’s distinction between ‘merchants’, high earners whose status comes from their income, who look up towards the top 1% and see their position as earned through merit more than luck - and ‘brahmins’, highly educated members of the cultural elite who are generally more aware of their own luck, but still tend to justify their status through hard work.

Self-delusion

Research commissioned by the New Statesman in 2022 found evidence of a ‘regression towards the mean’, with most Britons on incomes well above the average and well below the average saying that they felt “normal”, “fortunate”, or “hard done by” when compared with the average UK citizen.

People at the top end of the income or wealth distribution, and with high levels of education, status and/or power, are even better than most people at filtering out facts that don’t fit their preconceived ideas. They also have poorer ‘sociological imaginations’ then people on lower incomes, according to the sociologist Daniel Edmiston.

The US social psychologist Paul Piff has carried out experiments based on rigged games of Monopoly, in which some people have more resources at the start while others have less, to demonstrate that inequality influences how people think, such that people “who are winning at the game of life — who have more money, who have more privilege, who have more power” think that they deserve all of those things, and as such are less likely to think that inequality is a problem, and to be less willing to support efforts by the state or other actors in society to do anything about it. “We translate being better off than others to being better than others - the mind makes that translation.”