So why are so many Americans passive in the face of years of stagnating wages, reduced benefits, and mounting anxiety about whether work will run out before retirement benefits kick in? Why are the better-than-average-income Tea Partiers kicking up a fuss and not the actual poor, the 120 million Americans who own a small fraction of 1 percent of our wealth?
Ariely sees this as a form of learned helplessness.
What's that? "Imagine you have two dogs in two rooms," he said. "One dog hears a bell followed by an electric shock. This dog has a switch he can press with his paw that stops the shock, and he learns to press it when he hears the bell."
The other dog does not hear any bell to signal that the shock is coming and has no switch to turn it off.
"So now you move the two dogs and put them in two new rooms where they can move from one side of the room to the other over a low partition," Ariely explained. "One of the sides of the new room gives from time to time electrical shocks, but if the dog jumps over the partition to the other side of the room, he can escape the shock. When the shock comes, the first dog quickly learns to jump from one side of the room to the other, but the second dog just lies there and whimpers. This is learned helplessness, because when you cannot make a connection between cause and effect, you become depressed and just take it."
Ariely's theory fits with what my unemployed brother discovered. Eric went out on his own last week among his blue-collar friends in rural Oregon to talk about the severe lack of jobs there, the low wages without fringe benefits for those who do find work, and their concerns about the future.
"The people I live with and work with and talk to work at McDonald's or as security guards or on a road crew — they are high school graduates thinking only about paying their bills and have no idea about politics in this country," Eric told me.
"If you try to engage these people about the state of the economy, just in passing, they have no idea, and they don't care," Eric wrote. "They know bad things have happened to them, they know they can barely pay their bills. They are scared, but they don't know why things have gotten so bad, and they don't know how to find out anything. That's what scares me — they don't want to find out, because they say knowing won't change anything. They say what they know doesn't matter because they can't do anything about it."