Really? You are only 5'4. And you think laziness caused you to not make it to the National Basketball Association (NBA)?
While an undergraduate at a U.S. university, I took a course on Social Inequality. One day, the topic was social mobility within the United States. Basically, the professor was presenting a large amount of data indicating that poor people tend to stay poor and rich people tend to stay rich. No big deal right?
Wrong. Students in the class were in an uproar. The professor had just challenged (with somewhat indirectness) a cherished American belief, namely, that people can be whatever they want to be in the United States. For most Americans, the belief is that if you work hard, you will succeed. And if you fail, it must be your fault. The U.S. is so awesome and all, that it can't possibly be anything else. You are lazy and dumb and failed. Shame on you.
The highlight of this whole encounter was a student all of 5'4 insisting he could've played in the NBA had he worked harder. Nevermind his height, or the fact that he didn't exactly have an athletic build. He could've made it, in his mind. Other highlights included certain students in the class going to the dean of the college and insisting our professor be punished for pushing his political views onto his students.
I watched all this, half amused, half disgusted, and probably quite sleepy (it was college after all!). But was this just an anomaly? Or do Americans really get that touchy about the "American Dream?"
I decided to design an experiment to find out. Since free will is such an integral factor in the "American dream," I had half of my participants read an essay arguing that free will is an illusion, and the other read that it is real. The participants who read that it was an illusion later had more negative attitudes towards the poor.
In other words, merely suggesting that people do not have free will made them more likely to endorse the belief that they can become a big old awesome success in the U.S.
This has interesting implications, I think. When people try and point out that certain elements within the U.S. system are not as fair as people often perceive them to be, this likely triggers a reaction to oppose that. This is because the suggestion that something isn't fair likely triggers a defense of free will, which likely hinders social change (in many cases).
As my former fellow student would say: How dare you say I cannot make it in the U.S. I can, and hell, I could've even been an NBA star. Who cares if I was 5'4?
Threatening people's sense of free will makes them say and do incredulous things, and even blame the poor.
