Hardship Experience Reduces Support for Others

Although intuition suggests that experiencing adversity will increase a person's willingness to help others going through similar hardships, surveys show that this is not always the case. For example, immigrants who struggled through arduous naturalization processes do not necessarily support making the path to citizenship easier for others, and those who escaped poverty through hard work often oppose redistributive policies. Michelle Kim and colleagues hypothesize that this pattern is driven, at least in part, by people's desire to protect the perceived value of their achievement, which is felt to be greater due to the hardship required. To test this idea, the authors conducted two experiments. In the first, participants were asked to solve puzzles while being exposed to irregular high-pitched sounds and received tokens that entered them into a drawing for $20. Some participants were told the tokens were an endowment; others were told they had earned the tokens by successfully completing the puzzle. Those who believed that they earned the tokens were less likely to support removing the annoying noise for future participants. In the second experiment, participants solved puzzles while listening to either an unpleasant or pleasant sound for a chance to win a prize. Those who gritted their teeth and attained a prize entry after enduring the aversive sounds valued the prize less when they learned that future participants would not have to work as hard for the same prize, compared with when they were told that future participants would have to work as hard as they did. Those who did not suffer through unpleasant noises, on the other hand, didn't show this differential valuation, suggesting that they were not incorporating others' hardship into their valuation of the prize's worth. According to the authors, the social phenomenon of those who overcame hardship "pulling up the ladder" for others attempting to reach similar goals is motivated by people's desire to protect the value of their achievement from being cheapened.