Unemployment obviously has economic effects on people, but it can also have psychological impacts, sometimes triggering depressive episodes. However, until now, there has been no quantitative research evaluating consequences of unemployment on people’s feelings about money. A study published in PNAS finds that unemployment changes how people think about entitlement.

The study defines entitlement as the acknowledgement that someone has a right to keep, consume, or dispose of things that they have earned, including their salary. The idea of entitlement is important for understanding the labor market and workers’ self-interest. Generally, people who earn a higher income tend to be more self-interested, with minimal preference for wealth redistribution, whereas lower-income individuals tend to think that wealthier people should pay more taxes and poorer people should be eligible for social support.

The study examined participants’ attitudes on wealth redistribution and wealth entitlement twice, with a year-long gap between experiments. This setup allowed the researchers to study people who transitioned between various states of employment in the interim. The study was conducted in Spain, which has the third highest unemployment rate in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The attrition rate was 48 percent between the two experiments, and this paper focuses on 151 participants who were either employed or students for both experiments, or employed/students for the first experiment and unemployed for the second.

To test the relationship between employment and feelings of entitlement, participants were asked to play a game. They were provided with some play currency and told to make a decision regarding distributing the currency among themselves and three other people who were playing with them. The final wealth distribution would be picked at random among the four players’ suggestions.

The initial amount of currency provided to players was set in one of two ways: it was either randomly assigned, or it was determined by the players’ performance on a task they completed before the game. This latter condition was intended to make participants feel entitled to money they’d earned. The same setup was used a year later in the second experiment.

In general, during the first round of the experiment, employed participants tended to redistribute money more evenly when the initial allocation was due to chance; when they attributed the starting cash to performance on the pre-game task, the redistribution was less even. This paper did not include data on participants who were unemployed for the first experiment.

People whose employment status did not change in the year-long gap between experiments did not significantly change their behavior when the test was repeated. Those who were consistently employed or in school seemed to act on the belief that people should be allowed to hang on to much of the money that they’ve earned.

By contrast, people who became unemployed during the year-long gap between experiments changed their behavior considerably. Regardless of whether the money was randomly assigned or “earned,” people who became unemployed tended to redistribute the money equally among all players.

This finding hints at how employment status changes the way we think about our earnings and social responsibilities. Even if someone believed that they had the right to keep most of their own paycheck when they were employed, unemployment causes them to show a greater affinity for wealth redistribution. Unemployment seems to enhance the appreciation for a social safety net to support those who are less financially secure.

The researchers think that this change in perspective comes as unemployment compels people to depend on previously untapped social resources, such as unemployment benefits or other financial assistance systems. They think this shift in attitudes may be problematic: valuing earned money is one of the main motivations for obtaining employment, so a moral devaluation of earnings may be why some unemployed people become disengaged from the job hunt. Further research into this shift in attitude could help us keep more of the unemployed engaged in returning to the labor market.

PNAS, 2016. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1521250113, (About DOIs).