How TV and Service Projects Impact What Americans Believe About Inequality

American inequality is high and rising, but much of the public still believes the American dream is alive and well for anyone who works hard. Those views are hard to change, but new research suggests two paths with large effects in opposite directions. Cecilia Mo finds that the national service program Teach for America moved the attitudes of its participants toward those of the racial minority and poor students they teach. But Eunji Kim finds that any efforts are up against a dominant American narrative advanced daily on popular television. Rags-to-riches stories on reality TV shows make their viewers into strong believers in the American dream.

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Transcript

Matt Grossmann: This week on Political Research Digest, how to change American’s views of inequality from television to national service. From the Niskanen Center, I’m Matt Grossmann.

American inequality is high and rising, but much of the public still believes the American Dream is alive and well for anyone who works hard. Those views are hard to change, but new research suggests two paths with large effects in opposite directions. The national service program, Teach for America can move attitudes of the teachers who participate towards those of the racial minority and poor students they teach.

I talk to Cecilia Mo, of the University of California Berkeley, about her new American Political Science Review article with Katharine Conn, “When Do the Advantaged See the Disadvantages of Others?” She finds that those who just barely made the cutoff have lower racial resentment and higher perceptions of structural inequality compared to those who just missed it, but this effort is up against a dominant American narrative that anyone can make it with hard work, a perspective advanced daily on popular television.

I also talk with Eunji Kim of the University of Pennsylvania about her new paper, “Entertaining Beliefs in Economic Mobility.” She finds that rags to riches stories on reality TV shows make viewers into strong believers in the American Dream.

Attitudes toward inequality differ a lot across social groups based on their disadvantaged or advantaged position, and Cecilia Mo set out to find out how to close that gap.

Cecilia Mo: The focus of the study is first recognizing that there’s great divisions by both class and race in our country in terms of how they view the fairness of our society, whether or not meritocracy is something that is just a notion, an idea or something that is real in this country. So when we’re seeing that there is these big differences where those who are more well off, advantaged if you will, are viewing that the American Dream is alive and well, and meanwhile disadvantaged low income individuals or racial minorities are seeing that inequality is really stark in this country. And that this idea that if you just work hard, you can get ahead, that that is just a pipe dream. Our starting point was that, sort of recognizing that difference.

And so the question was, well, what is possible? What can be done short of actually decreasing inequality? What can be done to have advantaged individuals in the society take on the perspective of those who do not have as much as them?

Matt Grossmann: She was motivated by her personal experience in Teach for America, known as TFA, which changed her views.

Cecilia Mo: I was a Teach for America core member in 2002. I served as a high school math teacher in Los Angeles. I think that, not I think I know, that my experience there translated to certain shifts on my end and I think I was curious to see if I was an anomaly or an empirical regularity.

Matt Grossmann: It was a widespread experience. They found that participation had huge lasting effects on the views of society.

Cecilia Mo: We see these participants really taking on and adopting perspectives that are a lot more reflective of disadvantaged members of our country. Seeing that the economic, social, and political status quo is not quite as healthy. That things are not quite as fair, and that racial tolerance actually also increases, and that this is something that happens after they have this immersive experience, but it’s actually quite durable. That even seven years later we still see this effect.

Matt Grossmann: Teach for America moves elite recent college graduates into the nation’s poorest schools.

Cecilia Mo: Teach for America was an organization that started in 1990, and it recruits some of the highest performing kind of college graduates in this country. They do amazing work in being able to track something like over 50,000 individuals to apply each year and, when you look at the numbers, they’re able to attract, say 9% of all seniors at Ivy League schools to apply.

What they do is they place these top college graduates to some of the lowest performing schools in this country, and they serve as teachers in these schools for at least two years.

Matt Grossmann: It’s part of a long tradition of national service programs that sought to both serve communities and transform participants.

Cecilia Mo: Even at the beginning of the creation of these organizations, there was some sense that national service can do something really meaningful for the participant themselves, that eventually it would create a more civically engaged group of individuals that sort of really care about the health of their country.

Matt Grossmann: But that doesn’t make it easy to change attitudes toward inequality and race, which tend to be very resistant.

Cecilia Mo: Racial attitudes are really hard to change and ideas around disadvantage, those are all really hard to change. I think it all starts with the psychology concept known as the fundamental attribution error. There’s sort of this natural tendency to see the behavior of others as determined by their character while excusing their own behavior based on circumstance, and then people also have a tendency to sort of deny discriminatory actions towards outgroups.

Matt Grossmann: Mo and Conn took advantage of Teach for America’s application process change, which now uses a cutoff score to determine who is accepted.

Cecilia Mo: Teach for America, in 2007, started implementing a selection process where there was a cutoff score where those who made, through an interview process, had a score that exceeded this cutoff score were then admitted and those who were below that cutoff score were rejected. This, for an empirical researcher, was really helpful as the main concern with doing studies like this are what we call selection bias. That there might be that certain types of individuals apply to this program. So are we really picking up an effect which is just sorting that people of a certain kind of disposition are applying to these programs?

If we just focused on participants, we might not really be picking up on any effects of the program. We’re just picking up something about the types of people who do the service work. So by leveraging the selection score, we can compare those who were barely admitted to those who were barely rejected. And the idea is that these two groups are largely similar except for the fact that those who were barely accepted actually participated in the program.

Matt Grossmann: That makes it possible to identify the causal effect of participation, but we still don’t know how big the effect on applicants would compare to making the less interested participate.

Cecilia Mo: In an ideal researcher world, we’d just be able to mandate this program and randomly assign people to two different groups. I think there are a number of things in terms of how we generalize. So one could imagine that what we pick up is an overestimate. If the people who are eager to apply for these national service programs are those who are say more open to sort of seeing social injustice, that they are really eager to sort of take in what’s going on and they’re on more of an activist bent. So if that is who is applying for the program, you could imagine that the effects of the program are overestimates.

But on the flip side we can say that there could be ceiling effects. Meaning if these people who are participating in the program are already of this sort of progressive activist bent, who are very much sympathetic to the plights of the marginalized communities in our country, that there wasn’t really much room to change.

Matt Grossmann: For this group, Mo found big changes in both their awareness of inequality and their disappointment in political institutions ability to address it.

Cecilia Mo: TFA participants are more disappointed with how the institutions work and more likely to say that there are systematic injustices. I can take a step back and think about some of the interviews I had with alums and they sort of speak to, “I had no idea. I was a public school kid. I had no idea that some public schools in our country would have chairs falling apart, might have teachers that are largely sort of babysitting and not really teaching their kids anything,” and this sort of disappointment that took over. I think it’s that kind of experience that’s translating to this perspective, that you know what, our institutions are not working for some members of our society. That just because you are a public school kid, depending on what neighborhood you’re in, you are getting a very different type of education that’s going to set you up for more or less success.

Matt Grossmann: They also found massive effects on racial attitudes, enough to close the gap between whites and blacks on attitudes about black disadvantage.

Cecilia Mo: In terms of the magnitude, a 12.6 percentage point reduction in racial resentment. Well, what does that mean? So if we look at sort of how average Black Americans and White Americans answer this racial resentment battery in the American National Elections Study, we see that 12.6 percentage point is equivalent to 72% of the difference between how the average White American and the average Black American answers this question. So the effect sizes were quite huge. We interpret this as a decrease in blaming of minority communities for where they are in life.

Matt Grossmann: They found changes in closeness to particular groups, but only for those who actually taught the group in question.

Cecilia Mo: Across the board we saw racial resentment decrease, but when we asked questions around closeness to these communities, we saw that the closeness questions really only changed among those who really had day to day experiences with those communities. So 80% of the school student population that TFA participants work with are African American or Hispanic, but the range of communities that TFA places in quite vary. So when you’re placing in say the Rio Grande Valley, versus Baltimore, versus Detroit, a participant might be in a school where it’s 90% African American.

Other participants might be in communities where it’s 90%, 100% Hispanic. In addition to sort of like general questions around race, we asked these specific questions around specific groups of like, “Do you view yourself as closer to the African American community, Hispanic community and other groups?” We saw that, in terms of these closeness measures, they were restricted to the participants who actually were in communities.

So if you are a TFA participant that is in a largely Hispanic community, we saw movement and closeness to the Hispanic community, but not necessarily the African American community or Asian American community or any other groups. If you are a TFA participant who was mostly working with African Americans, we saw movement in closeness to the African American community, but not necessarily movement in other groups.

Matt Grossmann: They even found effects on unexpressed implicit biases based on skin color.

Cecilia Mo: We also asked this implicit racial measure. So we use implicit association tests with skin color and traditional studies on implicit bias. So implicit bias is sort of that unconscious automatic bias that people might not be aware that they even have. So we included that measure and studies speak to how amazingly difficult it is to change that and it makes sense. If it’s unconscious, that’s something that’s a bit more difficult to move. And at least in our study, we actually saw that skin color bias went down and that that reduction was actually quite significant and meaningful. So that was also something that gave us pause and hopefulness that even unconscious biases can change with these deep immersive experiences.

Matt Grossmann: Mo was happy to show that encounters with minority groups can lead to positive results, but she knows it’s difficult to scale up the program to give most Americans a similar experience.

Cecilia Mo: I think what makes me optimistic is that there’s been so many studies that sort of speak to how intergroup contact may not necessarily translate to good outcomes. Thinking about say the work of Putnam, that you have greater diversity and it might actually translate to breakdowns in trust. So when we’re thinking and sort of seeing these kind of studies that showed it’s really hard to have groups actually take on the perspective of others, it turns out that sometimes having groups that are very different bump up with one another can translate to greater polarization. This study gives me a little hope and optimism that there is in fact a way to bring people together and bridge differences and not just have these differences be accentuated.

Where I have some pause is Teach for America is not a simple intervention. It’s not going to be an easy sell to just say, you know what, every single person should be doing something like TFA or a Peace Corps and invest multiple years of their life to service.

Where I have some greater optimism is this sort of interest in say these gap years. Encouragement of universities really recognizing service, alternative spring break programs, and other sort of smaller scale service oriented interventions.

What we can’t say from the study is whether or not all two years were necessary to see this movement, and so future research really needs to unpack at what point can you actually start seeing these changes? How long, how immersive? And so that hasn’t fully been sorted out. So in that sense it may be a lighter touch might be possible.

Matt Grossmann: Any efforts will be up against American’s broad and persistent views that mobility is widespread. The related attitude that Eunji Kim sought to explain.

 Eunji Kim: Dependent variable, which is the perceptions of upward mobility, is something about the capturing the general belief that you think that anyone in America can get ahead as long as they are working hard. Or you think that the United States is still the land of economic opportunity. So these are the beliefs that I’m trying to explain. Then the reason why I wanted to explain this variable is because unlike the economic reality of intergenerational mobility rates, which refers to the proportion of children who are making more money than their parents at the age of 30, has been declining sharply by more than 40 percent over the last two decades.

But according to many different surveys and polls, a vast measuring of Americans are still very optimistic about the opportunity for a person to get ahead in the U.S. So this puzzling mismatch between public opinion surveys and the economic reality is something that motivated my entire dissertation project.

Matt Grossmann: Americans believe the dream. We have some explanations, but still need to understand who believes the most.

 Eunji Kim: American political culture has been the most dominant explanation for why Americans believe in the American Dream, and almost all qualitative explanations have been along the lines of believing the American Dream is just deeply embedded in America methodology due to a unique set of historical factors. Whether its existence of the frontier or the persistence and the work ethic in the colonial era.

My dissertation doesn’t really challenge this view per se, as there are multiple factors that can affect perceptions of economic mobility. But what I’m arguing in my dissertation is that while history of experience is unique to America as a nation, can that really explain that much the individual variations and perceptions of mobility? So American political culture can explain the constant in the belief and the mobility, but it doesn’t really tell us the variations. Right now in my paper, I’m linking the media exposure to mass media to the individual variations in the belief in the American Dream.

Matt Grossmann: The answer she came up with was television, the entertainment media Americans watch most.

Eunji Kim: The important takeaway is that contemporary Americans are watching a lot of rags to riches entertainment media. Ranging from America’s Got Talent to Shark Tank, and so this content that we consume for leisure everyday matters for the study of politics as they affect perceptions of upward economic mobility.

Matt Grossmann: Americans stand out internationally, both for our high belief in mobility and our extraordinary television diet.

Eunji Kim: Even up to now, the Americans are a much more optimistic any other Europeans, and indeed Americans are the only developed economies according to the latest study that overestimates extent to its upper mobilities possible. Europeans tend to be more pessimistic than economic reality. So that’s that. And when it comes to entertainment media, the answer is yes, because when it comes to TV consumption, there’s no other country that comes close to America when it comes to entertainment media consumption.

Matt Grossmann: The reality TV boom is global, but no one has caught up to us.

Eunji Kim: The rise of reality TV shows is definitely a global phenomena, but what’s interesting is because the sheer number of hours that Americans watching TV are just overwhelmingly higher than the other countries. So the effects of entertainment media, whether that’s reality TV shows that I’m examining in my paper, or others, has to be stronger in the U.S. because we just watch more in this country.

Matt Grossmann: Kim focuses on rags to riches television shows whic

from nicholemhearn digest https://niskanencenter.org/blog/how-tv-and-service-projects-impact-what-americans-believe-about-inequality/