Apparently the majority of Americans believe that poor individual outcomes are driven by individual traits. Europeans, on the other hand, are more likely to think that poor outcomes are the result of injustice, discrimination, other societal factors, and bad luck. This is the downside to the American Dream, perhaps.
William Julius Wilson, the Lewis P and Linda L Geyser University Professor at Harvard, and past President of the American Sociological Association, is a charismatic speaker, and spent some time today rousing a very large ballroom with a passionate speech about culture and social structure, and the interaction between them.
The message is that we, as psychologists, need to take these factors into account, but there are enormous measurement challenges to overcome. Even randomized control trials looking at poverty and neighborhood effects, such as the Moving to Opportunity randomized control trial, may miss some crucial effects. Chicago is a good place to hear this message, home to many of the best sociological studies and research groups over the last century.
We've been lucky with the speakers today. Suniya Luthar and Rand Conger took part in a new SRA format called 'Invited Views by Two'. Both addressed questions of resilience and well-being, but in very different ways. Professor Luthar explored the moods and problems of middle-class suburban kids who seem to do not a great deal better (and in fact sometimes worse) than their inner city peers. Lots of this seems to be do with achievement pressure, isolation from most adults, and criticism from those they live with. This is a new thing; looking specifically at relatively privileged youth (on purpose, rather than as a by product of using university students as your sample).
Professor Conger, on the other hand, spoke about the Iowa Youth and Family children, who grew up in the 1980s in rural small towns during the farm crisis, when government subsidies were being withdrawn and anyone with less than 500 acres began to sink. The papers from this study have been enormously influential over the years; it is one of the best examples of a good longitudinal project, and it has always taken seriously the message about social context.
These young people are now in their twenties - this makes me feel old, as I worked on some of the Iowa data in the early 1990s, when, if I remember rightly, they were in primary school. Rand presented the first decade of adulthood as a time of recovery from the stresses and strains of adolescence, when better relationships, first jobs, reduction in ambiguity and self doubt all lead to rises in happiness, mastery, self-esteem.
However he did point out that, even though they grew up in hard times, the time in their lives when these people were happiest, and felt life held most excitement and promise, was when they were 14. When we think about adolescents, we need to remember those feelings, as well as the anxiety and stress.