Americans And Danes Agree On Welfare

In fact, their views are almost identical, a recent study suggests, as long as you tell them whether the recipient in question is “unlucky” or “lazy”:

When modern individuals – Americans and Danes alike – form opinions on who deserves welfare in mass society, they do so using the same psychology that has guided help-giving decisions for millenniums: they watch out for cheaters and seek to help reciprocators. The key question guiding our intuitions about recipient deservingness is: Is this a person who is motivated to give something back to me and society? These psychological systems designed for cheater-detection and decision-making about reciprocity crowd out cultural learning and a lifetime of exposure to different welfare state cultures. Therefore, when provided with direct information about the motivation and the circumstances of the social welfare recipients, just two sentences of information can make Danes and American become substantially and statistically indistinguishable in their social welfare opinions.