There are a number of things wrong with Mitt Romney’s now infamous suggestion that the 47 percent of Americans who don’t pay federal income tax will automatically support larger government, because those “who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them” can never be persuaded to “take personal responsibility and care for their lives.” For one, as both Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein note, the people who aren’t paying income tax are overwhelmingly either college-aged or elderly retirees who aren’t making much taxable income, not able-bodied layabouts in their 30s and 40s. In other words, they’re mostly not some distinct parasite class, but rather ordinary, hard-working people who either already have paid or will soon be paying quite substantial taxes.
The deeper mistake, however, is what social psychologists have dubbed the “fundamental attribution error”: the nigh universal human tendency to ascribe actions and outcomes to immutable personal characteristics rather than situational factors. We assume too quickly that someone behaves kindly or callously because they are a “kind person” or a “callous person”—yet research suggests that minor variations in circumstances can elicit either type of behavior from the very same people.
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