Saturday, January 12, 2013

Entrenched Beliefs about Welfare Recipients: How They Developed and Why They Won't Change


During the political campaigning preceding the elections and even after their conclusion two months ago, I’ve seen dozens of posts, comments, reposted statements etc. that emphatically claim that those receiving welfare are lazy and are essentially being made dependents of the government. I’ve read posts equating these recipients to animals whom are fed repeatedly and will no longer look for food on their own. I’ve scrolled through many statements claiming that these individuals are making conscious choices to avoid work because it is easier and more lucrative to haul in all of the government assistance and to then live at a higher economic level than if they went to work each day.

In my current work as a psychologist and my graduate school job as a provider in the Community Mental Health System, I’ve known hundreds of individuals whom received governmental assistance. In the group homes for the severely developmentally disabled, I worked with dozens of folks who were severely autistic or Downs Syndrome, were often nonverbal, had other significant medical problems, and weren’t capable of independent functioning. Yet most days, we packed up a lunch for them, put them on a Dean Transportation Bus, and sent them off to work for the day at Peckham Industries putting tooth brushes together or other such tasks. It was then back to the group home where we waited to assist them through all the daily living skills most adults take for granted. And every week, we headed out grocery shopping with government subsidized money to buy food for these amazing individuals.

In my private practice work, of the hundreds of people I’ve worked with who’ve received government assistance, I’ve never once met one who was lazy or refusing to work so that they could receive benefits. In fact, nearly everybody WAS working, sometimes at more than one job, but not making quite enough money to provide things for their family or to meet some essential needs. A very large number of the recipients have been children of parents who work hard every day at jobs that don’t provide health insurance benefits for their families.

But I have a strong enough research and scientific background to know that conclusions can’t be drawn from a sample size of a few hundred, non-randomly selected or representative subjects, so I can’t assume that these individuals are characteristic of all those who draw government assistance. What challenges my patience, however, is that I believe that nearly everybody I’ve seen make comments or parrot what they’ve heard someone say on their favorite radio or talk show about welfare recipients being lazy, dependent, freeloaders who spend their money on drugs and alcohol, have rarely if ever met somebody who is actually receiving welfare.

As a psychologist there is a need to be open to alternative viewpoints, so I felt I had to consider the question of why all of these people believe as they do about welfare recipients. It is what they believe and they believe it strongly, and as I’ve stated in prior articles, until there is an understanding of different beliefs, it is difficult to work together on issues and find points of change or compromise. I did some fact checking in an effort to understand how this narrowly focused and ingrained belief about welfare recipients was generated.

When then President Bill Clinton and Congress passed the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program in 1996, it replaced the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program. The goal was to reduce welfare dependency by requiring recipients to work to receive cash assistance and by limiting how long a family can remain on welfare. The number of recipients receiving welfare has declined by more than 50% since this enactment (Brookings Institution).

So were there in fact the stereotyped “welfare queens” who survived indefinitely with their kids through government assistance while AFDC existed? And if so, what percentage of recipients of AFDC did they comprise? I researched these questions and found differing opinions with insufficient methodologically sound scientific data to draw definitive conclusions about AFDC recipients. I do remember as a child of the 70s and 80s regularly hearing the stereotyped view of welfare recipients being lazy, minority individuals. I don’t remember there being any moon-faced, bigoted, bombast on the radio at the time regularly making statements about those on welfare, but yet this stereotyped view of AFDC recipients seemed to be pervasive.

I believe then, as I’ve mentioned in prior articles, that the posts, comments, and statements about welfare recipients that I noted in the first paragraph come from people who have always held and continue to hold onto viewpoints that they genuinely believe to be true because they have ALWAYS believed it to be true. As I’ve stated before, once we hold a belief about something, humans generally continue to collect “evidence” that supports what they believe and to discount and ignore any opposing evidence.

As such, when we hear our favorite radio or TV talk show host declaring rhetoric that we already believe, it feels like additional evidence for that viewpoint, even though it is just rhetoric and not grounded in factual data or evidence. When people see a reposted statement in some form in the social media that is some version of the declarations they’ve heard hundreds of times, they again add that as more evidence for what they already believe and become more entrenched in their views.

And I believe often, people don’t really generate the opportunity to discover or even want to consider opposing evidence to their beliefs. I was fortunate to encounter in my line of work hundreds of individuals receiving government assistance and quickly realized that my childhood beliefs were grossly misguided and inaccurate and not rooted in current data or evidence. I know for a fact that many of the people I see screaming the loudest about the lazy, dependent people on welfare have never or rarely met someone they knew to receive TANF, nor have they attempted to check factually based sites and sources of information discussing the true welfare recipients. They instead continue to listen to the people who say what they already believe and they parrot this information back out in some form.

For the sake of argument, even if there were stereotyped “welfare queens” in the AFDC recipient pool, TANF requirements that recipients participate in job training, demonstrate proof of efforts to find employment, and time limited benefit eligibility have made it incredibly difficult for the existence of many “welfare queens” for many years. Yet I hear essentially the same comments and declarations about those receiving TANF that I heard 30 years ago. I expect to hear this rhetoric in another 30 years because rigid belief systems don’t change unless people desire to consciously and open-mindedly consider alternative information to their beliefs, and I rarely see this desire.

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