Social Welfare is Very Much Societal Cognitive-Emotional Integration
By Dani Mills UA’24 and Jim Stellar
DM just applied to be a Social Welfare graduate student after taking JS’ course in How the Brain decides. She is interested in how social welfare is a societal decision every day for both the practitioner and for the client. We are both interested in how various countries support families in poverty and a key study on this exists in European and other countries. We are interested in how this societal process works and how basic brain mechanisms may support these societal influences.
First, let’s consider poverty. Poverty occurs in an individual or community that lacks the financial resources and basic needs for a minimum standard of living. Many policy makers assume that the families and individuals are at fault for their own poverty. Even though there have been many changes to the economic and social conditions of families, the family social policy in the United States has not changed. It is known from the study cited above, that the United States spends a fraction of what Sweden spends on family benefits. In the same study, the United States and Sweden are seen to have philosophical and programmatical differences among their family policies. The U.S. social policy was persistent in stating that the poor economic conditions of families with a female being the sole income producer are a deviant family form. The public refused to see how the family structure could be a possible cause of economic changes. In contrast, Sweden proposed family policies that addressed single women who were a parent and a worker. This policy looked at parents as an individual instead of parts of a family unit. With this policy, Sweden was able to address any issues an individual parent was having, regardless of their family structure.
Turning to the brain, what accounts for this difference and what does it have to do with the brain, particularly the social brain? Part of the story is how we integrate implicit and explicit information. In Sweden, for example, the focus is on the individual and to us, that seems to be less traditionally sexist. Groups are well-known to be driven in part by emotional interactions. So for example, if a woman bought a horse at the time of the US Declaration of Independence, she could own that horse. However, when she got married the horse became the husband’s property, and she could not make another purchase without his permission, even if she had her own money. This view of women was common at the time because it was, we suggest, the emotionally accepted community standard. Today that standard seems ludicrous. We see women today as individuals, not subordinate to men, even when married.
In this blog series we often make a point of how the limbic system (emotions) communicates with the neocortex (cognitive). The limbic system transmits a value indicator on an event or a concept, but it does not tell the neocortex how it did that calculation. It’s like a math teacher who receives student’s work but only gets the final number. If it’s wrong, the teacher doesn’t know whether the error was algebraic or a problem with how the student did the calculation. Yet, we believe in the famous quote from Oscar Wilde when asked about a cynic who then answered “A man (or woman) who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.” Without the limbic system, the neocortex is a cynic. It learns, analyzes, and stores information; and it makes our plans and our laws. But the neocortex is or would be a cynic … unless it has a value calculation from the limbic system to attach to that cognitive information.
As another example of societal structures, members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) have stated that countries where women perform paid work have the highest fertility and lowest poverty rates. In one study, these countries have family policies that provide a balance between women’s fertility and their employment. One of the main aims of family policies for OECD countries is fostering employment. The more women that are employed contributes to the economic and financial sustainability of the welfare state. An increase in highly qualified women being employed yields productivity gains and fosters economic growth. This family policy supports women joining the workforce leading to a decrease in poverty rates, and ensures that women are being treated as an individual and receiving the support required for them to be a parent and an employee. It allows parental leave after child-birth, security of income and employment, childcare services adapted to fit the schedule of the working parent, and a tax and benefit system containing incentives to work.
Countries can be categorized in three ways. The first group is those who encourage employment for married and single mothers by providing support services. The second group discourages employment for both groups by providing lower levels of support for employment and weaker benefits. And finally, the third group discourages employment for married mothers by not providing supportive services. However, this group encourages single mothers to become employed through a lack of alternatives. So, what does this mean for the poverty levels of different countries? First, it should be noted that married women face significantly less poverty than single women. Single women are three to four times more likely to fall into poverty. During the 1990s, it was found that pre-tax and transfer poverty rates for married women with children are the lowest in what are characterized as Conservative regimes, and the worst in the Liberal regimes. However, by the 2000s, these Conservative and the Social Democratic regimes had an overlap in poverty rates. The poverty rates in countries drop significantly when taking in the effects of welfare and tax policies. Poverty rates for married and single women with children drop from 14% and 69% to 7% and 32%. Although, this drop is less significant for the United States.
Besides traditions embodied in policies and laws, societal influences are supported by the way the brain works and our sense of being in this life together. Having evolved in groups from our earliest evolutionary days, we developed mechanisms for working together. For example, consider the brain mechanism of oxytocin, the milk-let-down hormone that permits nursing behavior. Oxytocin seems to have been extended by evolution to bonding, even among men. For example, in a typical neuroeconomics game where money is exchanged and generosity is a factor, giving the participants (even males) oxytocin, produces greater generosity. Such brain mechanisms could sustain groups, even large groups by developing reciprocal altruism that allows sophisticated, trusting, group operations that benefit individual survival. But this same bonding could result in harm to individuals that might not fit or to discriminated-against groups. So one must do some careful thinking here.
Social workers enter into this complex dynamic at a practical level, and they try to make it better for the individual woman and their families. They are tasked to examine roles, equity, and fairness in the profession but also within society and with the women they serve each day. To return to the opening theme, this is where social workers come in and that is how we started this blog with DM applying to be one of them.
