Beyond 'mythbusting': How to respond to myths and perceived undeservingness in the British benefits system

Abstract

In a context of 'hardening' attitudes towards benefit claimants in Britain, some argue that social security can only be rebuilt when 'benefit myths' and negative attitudes are tackled. However, this paper argues that some of these concerns are misplaced, based on evidence on (i) the extent of myths; (ii) the effectiveness of mythbusting; and (iii) the existence of myths/negative attitudes in times/places the benefits system is more popular. It argues that public attitudes are fundamentally characterised by ambivalence, and the critical issue is the balance between positive and negative aspects and which of these are triggered in public debate.

Full text

This is the post-peer reviewed version of an article published in the Journal of Poverty and
Social Justice. The definitive publisher-authenticated version of “Beyond 'mythbusting': how
to respond to myths and perceived undeservingness in the British benefits system” in the
Journal of Poverty and Social Justice, 24:291-306 is available at
http://doi.org/10.1332/175982716X14721954314968.

Beyond ‘mythbusting’: how to respond to myths and perceived
undeservingness in the British benefits system
Ben Baumberg Geiger (University of Kent at Canterbury), b.b.geiger@kent.ac.uk
Bart Meueleman (University of Leuven), bart.meuleman@kuleuven.be
Abstract
In a context of ‘hardening’ attitudes towards benefit claimants in Britain, some argue that
social security can only be rebuilt when ‘benefit myths’ and negative attitudes are tackled.
However, this paper argues that some of these concerns are misplaced, based on evidence
on (i) the extent of myths; (ii) the effectiveness of mythbusting; and (iii) the existence of
myths/negative attitudes in times/places the benefits system is more popular. It argues that
public attitudes are fundamentally characterised by ambivalence, and the critical issue is the
balance between positive and negative aspects and which of these are triggered in public
debate.

Introduction
Labour’s defeat in the 2015 British General Election can be explained by a great many
factors, as the official post-mortem (the ‘Beckett report’) makes clear. However, when the
Beckett report was published, the headlines in the left-wing newspapers consistently settled
on the party’s lack of trust by the public on ‘welfare’ as a key explanation for their dismal
election result (alongside parallel concerns about the economy and immigration).1 This
reflects a much wider preoccupation on the British left in recent years (not just within the
Labour Party) about how to respond to public attitudes towards the benefits system, which
are generally perceived to be both harsh and based on ‘myths’ fuelled by politicians and the
media, leaving the public fundamentally at odds with left-wing values (e.g. Hills, 2014;
Horton & Gregory, 2009; Taylor-Gooby, 2015). This potentially leaves progressives with a
choice of either trying to correct the public’s myths, or simply accommodating their policy
agenda to a view of the world that they do not share.
In this paper, however, I want to argue that some of these concerns are misplaced, bringing
together several different pieces of empirical evidence that have not previously been
integrated. To be absolutely clear: the British public do believe myths, and they are also
more negative about benefit claimants than they used to be, as I will show. Yet this does not
mean that ‘mythbusting’ is the best way of getting public support for progressive benefit
reforms. While myths are associated with negative perceptions of claimants, evidence
suggest mythbusting is unlikely to change this. Moreover, such attitudes are not what
primarily sets us apart from times and places where there is more public support for the
benefits system. Instead, what is crucial is how far the public focus on the positive
consequences of the benefits system, and how much we focus on the (widely-perceived)
positive vs. negative consequences in our public debates.
Myths and deservingness judgements in 21st-century Britain
There are two parts to the prevailing view of British benefit attitudes. Firstly, the idea that
public attitudes have become more hostile is, as Hudson and Lunt (in press) put it, “now
close to an orthodox view.” This is hardly surprising in the face of newspaper headlines that
have regularly proclaimed that attitudes towards benefit claimants are ‘hardening’, often
based on the latest launch of the British Social Attitudes (BSA) survey.2 And this consensus
is not completely divorced from the empirical reality: attitudes towards unemployment benefit
claimants have definitely hardened, and noticeably fewer people believe that the government
should spend more on ‘welfare benefits for the poor’ (Clery, 2012; Taylor & Taylor-Gooby,
2015), as illustrated in Figure 1 below.
1 See http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jan/14/beckett-report-labour-lost-2015-election-
economy-immigrants-benefits, http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/devastating-beckett-report-
reveals-labour-7206957, and http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/jeremy-corbyn-hasnt-
won-back-the-publics-trust-on-welfare-and-immigration-says-margaret-beckett-a6822306.html.
2 See http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2009/02/hardening-attitudes-towards-welfare-make-reform-an-
easier-sell/, http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-21716638, and
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/labour/10055079/Labour-voters-harden-their-hearts-against-
welfare.html

Yet the existence of this decline can blind us to the nuances of shifts in public opinion.
Comparing current views to the late 1980s, the numbers saying that ‘most people on the
dole are fiddling in one way or another’ or that ‘many people who get social security don’t
really deserve any help’ has barely risen (Taylor & Taylor-Gooby, 2015), as also shown in
Figure 1. Moreover, it is still the case – despite the financial crisis, and despite hardening
attitudes to unemployed people – that more people agree than disagree that the
Government should raise ‘welfare benefits for the poor, even if it means higher taxes’ (see
Baumberg, 2014 and below). There is some truth to the idea that attitudes to the benefits
system have hardened, but the scale and uniformity of these shifts is perceived to be greater
than the evidence bears out.
[Figure 1 about here]
The second part of the prevailing view is that the public do not have an accurate view of the
benefits system, instead believing ‘myths’ (often argued to be spread by parts of the press;
see Baumberg et al., 2012). This is not just a view of think-tanks and campaigning
organisations, but is also shared by notable academics such as John Hills (2014) and Peter
Taylor-Gooby (2015). It is also supported by the empirical evidence, if anything even more
strongly than increasing hostility towards benefit claimants. In a separate paper I
systematically reviewed 46 beliefs across 18 datasets, and compared these to the best
available data on the true picture (Baumberg Geiger, submitted). My overall conclusion was
that the British public do indeed have low levels of understanding of the benefits system,
primarily in ways that would seem to imply that claimants are undeserving:
•People wildly overestimate how much is spent on unemployment benefits compared
to pensions. They also overestimate other related aspects of unemployment benefits
(how much claimants without children receive, and the proportion of the population
that is unemployed).
•Half the population believe out-of-work benefit claims have risen in the past fifteen
years, when they have actually fallen noticeably.
•It is difficult to know the true level of benefit fraud – but the Government’s extensive
attempts to estimate the level of probable fraud suggest low levels, and even
assuming this is a lower bound, the public overestimate fraud compared to any
reasonable figure.
•On almost no measure do more than one-third of individuals give a correct answer
(as I define it, allowing some room for uncertainty / rounding in people’s numeric
responses).
Inevitably there are further important nuances here. The public are in fact relatively accurate
on average when estimating the share of the working-age population who currently claim
out-of-work benefits (and within this, nearly one in four people provide underestimates rather
than overestimates). People also tend to underestimate how much certain sorts of claimants
receive, believing the system is less generous to pensioners and unemployed people with
children than it really is. And it is important to avoid a false air of absolute certainty around
these myths; the true figures are often uncertain, and people’s beliefs are obtained from
sample surveys (often web panels) in which response biases are likely. Still, these nuances
do not change the overall picture, in which the evidence strongly supports the assumption of
widespread myths.

The role of mythbusting
While there do seem to be widespread benefit myths, my critique here is the implication that
‘mythbusting’ is the best way of getting public support for progressive benefit reforms. It is
important not to construct a straw man here; Hills (2014) and Peter Taylor-Gooby (2015) are
not naively arguing that mythbusting is the panacea for all public concerns. Yet the need to
tackle misperceptions is a common theme in progressive debate, and sometimes is central:
for example, an article in the Guardian newspaper argues that “it is perhaps this ignorance
[of the welfare state] which is putting the survival of a safe system of support for the
population at especial risk” (Beresford, 2013), while the Independent newspaper contained a
headline, “Voters ‘brainwashed by Tory welfare myths’, says new poll” (Grice, 2013). More
broadly, ‘mythbusters’ are commonly used as an element in campaigning (among many
others, see Baptist Union of Great Britain et al., 2013; Coote & Lyall, 2013).
However, mythbusters suffer two sets of problems in changing public attitudes: they may not
change people’s beliefs, and even if they do, these changes in beliefs may not result in
changes in attitudes. I review the evidence for each of these in turn.
The impact of mythbusting on factual beliefs
We might expect that presenting people with the facts will make their beliefs more accurate –
but sadly persuasion is rarely that simple. Partly this is a matter of memory: the familiarity of
misperceptions may linger even after the detail of their inaccuracy fades (Peter & Koch,
2015). Moreover, repeated misperceptions increase the fluency with which we can access
the underlying idea, which makes the idea seem more credible, pithily summarised by Lakoff
(2014) as ‘don’t think of an elephant!’ As a result, “it is extremely difficult to return the beliefs
of people who have been exposed to misinformation to a baseline similar to those of people
who were never exposed to it” (Lewandowsky et al., 2012). It is also a matter of ‘reactance’,
an instinctive bristling when being told what to think (Lewandowsky et al., 2012). For these
reasons, it is even possible that mythbusting will make our beliefs even less accurate.
But beyond this, there is also a crucial challenge around credibility. Sometimes a myth will
appear to be more credible than the truth, particularly where the ‘mythbuster’ comes from an
untrusted source. Hence for some right-wing individuals with hostile attitudes to benefit
claimants, mythbusters by campaigning organisations that they usually distrust are unlikely
to be convincing. These issues are magnified when the myths are part of a compelling story
or ‘frame’ that fits with people’s wider mental models, whereas the facts are disembodied
and would leave gaps in people’s understanding of the world. As the influential George
Lakoff puts it (2006), “facts can be assimilated into the brain only if there is a frame to make
sense out of them… The consequence is that arguing simply in terms of facts… will likely fall
on deaf ears”.
Theory therefore suggests that mythbusting may either work or backfire – and there is now a
burgeoning literature that seeks to test which way this falls empirically. Much of this stems
from Nyhan & Reifler (2010), who show that mythbusting can fail or even backfire across
several policy issues (Iraq, stem cell research, and tax cuts). However, an alternative
interpretation of the Nyhan & Reifler study is that its attempts to improve knowledge are
simply weak and unconvincing; for example, in the Iraq story where everyone received an
article about a Bush speech on the invasion, the ‘mythbusting’ was a few lines at the bottom
of the article mentioning a CIA report documenting the absence of WMD. Other research in

the same vein but with various types of mythbusting has been more mixed, with some
showing similar results (Peter & Koch, 2015) but others finding that mythbusting can be
effective. For example, newspaper articles that correct misperceptions can change beliefs
even in the midst of induced emotions and partisan biases (Weeks, 2015).
When it comes to benefits beliefs themselves, the only relevant experimental study is a
recent working paper by Barnes et al (2016). They build their experiment around the UK
Government’s decision to send all taxpayers a ‘taxpayer receipt’ showing what their money
was spent on. (It should be noted that the statements themselves have been heavily
criticised for being misleading.3) Barnes et al find that people’s knowledge of public spending
in general improves after receiving the information, and that people who were encouraged to
check the receipt had better knowledge than people who did not, although they do not show
whether this applies more or less to perceived social security spending vs. other spending.
Other studies using different designs on different beliefs, however, have suggested that
benefits mythbusting is likely to fail. Repeated qualitative studies in the UK have presented
people with factual information, and found that it is simply not believed by participants. Not
all facts are rejected out-of-hand; a growth in housing benefit claims among working people
has some resonance, for example (Doron & Tinker, 2013). But mythbusters that contradict
people’s existing beliefs are widely rejected, particularly when they are based on statistics
produced by distrusted institutions (Doron & Tinker, 2013; Mattinson, 2014:51). For example,
one study reported that “in cases where the evidence appeared to contradict their original
views, participants typically dismissed the evidence as ‘government propaganda’ or
‘newspaper talk’” (Knight, 2015). Similarly, an Ipsos MORI/Demos study quoted one
respondent saying, “How do they get these figures then? Is it because they don’t want
people to know that their system is rubbish and that they’re being conned? Because we’re
being conned all over the place with immigration, the whole lot, so I don’t think I’d trust the
figures” (Duffy et al., 2013).
The impact of mythbusting on attitudes
A further assumption in benefits mythbusting is that there is a causal link between people’s
beliefs about the benefits system and their deservingness judgements. This is plausible in
the light of the empirical literature, but with caveats. In a separate analysis (Baumberg
Geiger, In Press), I show that beliefs about the benefits system are often strongly associated
with deservingness judgements, even after controlling for political preferences and
sociodemographic factors (education, working status, region, age and gender). One way of
expressing this relationship is via a method that Sturgis (2003) terms ‘simulation’, which
estimates what the population’s attitudes would be if their knowledge was uniformly correct.
A selection of the simulation results from Baumberg Geiger (In Press) are shown below in
Table 1.
[Table 1 about here]
For example, this shows that if people knew the correct proportion of welfare spending that
was fraudulent – taking ‘correct’ to be 10% of claims to allow for hidden fraud and a margin
of error, but noting that this is considerably higher than the government’s extensive fraud-
checking suggests – then 8.1% fewer people would agree that there is a ‘dependency
3 See http://www.ifs.org.uk/publications/7424.

culture’. Overall, the models suggest that for most beliefs, if people’s knowledge was correct
then 5-10% fewer would agree that claimants are undeserving. These add up to a
considerable effect for the four beliefs that are in the same survey – 73.8% believed that
there was a dependency culture if they were wrong on all four beliefs, compared to only
35.9% for those with 3 or 4 correct answers. However, beliefs about the level of benefits that
claimants receive, or their incentive to work, have no relationship with deservingness
judgements, presumably depending on their connections to the particular belief structure
held by the individual (see further discussion in Baumberg Geiger, In Press).
Yet while people with certain beliefs hold certain attitudes, this may indicate that their
attitudes determine their beliefs rather than vice versa. People tend to selectively expose
themselves to information – and to interpret the information they do receive – in ways that
support their existing attitudes, a much-researched phenomenon known as ‘motivated
reasoning’ (e.g. Taber et al., 2009). Not only does this make it difficult to convince someone
to change strongly held beliefs (as above), but if a certain belief changes, then people may
rearrange the structure of their worldview to continue justify their attitudes, rather than
changing the attitude itself.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the experimental evidence on the impact of information on attitudes
is mixed. Kuziemko et al (2015) found that giving people inequality-related information made
them much more likely to agree that inequality was a serious problem and support a higher
estate tax (but had no impact on support for other policy proposals such as a higher
millionaire tax). In contrast, Lawrence & Sides (2014) found no impacts on policy attitudes of
giving people a varied list of policy-relevant statistics. Overall, Lawrence & Sides (2014)’s
conclusion seems reasonable: “providing knowledge can, but does not necessarily, change
people’s minds about political issues.” (It is also worth noting that these survey experiments
are a slightly artificial design that is likely to overestimate the real-life, longer-term impacts of
mythbusting (Barabas & Jerit, 2010)).
When it comes to benefits beliefs, the evidence is sparse but more pessimistic. One study
found that several pieces of information had no impact on people’s support for benefits-
related policies (Kuklinski et al., 2000). The UK experiment on ‘tax receipts’ by Barnes et al
did find that knowledge improved (see above), but without any change in attitudes. One
interpretation is that mythbusters and other sources of information can give people ‘facts’
that they then later repeat to survey interviewers, which is a far cry from fundamental
transformations in people’s ways of thinking that would lead them to support different
policies. This would also explain why other types of mythbusting have been found to
influence beliefs but have no effect (or even contrary effects) on attitudes (Nyhan & Reifler,
2015).
A blueprint for successful mythbusting
This does not necessarily mean that all mythbusting is doomed to failure – but it does
provide several lessons(Lewandowsky et al., 2012). Firstly, disembodied facts do not help
people come to a more accurate worldview, and it is instead better to provide mythbusting
embedded within alternative stories that ‘fill the coherence gap’ (Lewandowsky et al., 2012).
This is also the conclusion of those who have experimented with mythbusting in Britain, who
argue “the successful ‘scrounger’ narrative is rooted in anecdote, stories and symbols, not
statistics.” (Mattinson, 2014), or more succinctly, “foster conversations, don’t just dispense
facts" (Doron & Tinker, 2013). Some commentators are coming to similar conclusions that

“fact-busting has its limits” (Moore, 2013) or that we should stop “bombarding the electorate
with statistics that don’t resonate” (Jones, 2016).
Secondly, mythbusting needs to be credible for the people it is trying to influence. One
charity described their wider attempt at publishing a mythbusting supplement in the New
Statesman magazine, which “was well received – but only by people who were already well
informed. There is no evidence to date to suggest that we have changed anyone’s mind”
(Knight, 2015). Rather than appealing to the converted, successful mythbusting “must be
tailored” to the people who need to be convinced, “preferably by ensuring that the correction
is consonant with the audience’s worldview” (Lewandowsky et al., 2012:120). Indeed, there
is some – albeit suggestive rather than definitive – evidence that ‘partisan politicians who
speak against their own apparent political interests’ may be the most effective voices of
mythbusting (Berinsky, 2015).
Finally, mythbusting may do more than simply directly change people’s minds. Nyhan &
Reifler (2014) test if drawing state legislators’ attention to the Pullitzer-winning ‘Politifact’
operation leads them to make fewer claims that are later fact-checked and found to be
untrue. While the numbers of claims that are fact-checked by Politifact is relatively small over
this period and the analyses therefore low-powered, there is some suggestive evidence that
there is an effect. Mythbusting may therefore contribute to a more truthful public debate, and
have an indirect impact on public attitudes via the behaviour of elected representatives and
other prominent public figures. Still, while well-constructed benefits mythbusting may have
some value, it seems a distant hope that it will have a transformative effect on the public’s
knowledge and attitudes on benefits.
Myths and deservingness judgements in other times and places
If mythbusting is likely to fail, then British progressives may resign themselves to the
impossibility of progressive reforms in the midst of a hostile public debate. Yet this too relies
on a faulty assumption about the difference between contemporary Britain and other times
and places in which the benefits system is more generous, as this section explains.
While the evidence on benefit beliefs in other times and places is thin, the limited evidence
that exists suggests that the public are never particularly well-informed about the benefits
system. In Britain, Golding & Middleton (1982:174) found that an outright majority
overestimated a hypothetical family’s income on Supplementary Benefit in 1977, though
perceptions of the level of unemployment seemed to be reasonably accurate. Hudson &
Lunt’s review of even earlier survey data (this volume) finds that understanding of the
famous Beveridge Report in 1942 was limited. There is no comparative data on benefits
beliefs across countries, but Scandinavians similarly have imperfect knowledge of their
unemployment and long-term sickness rates, with only around half of respondents managing
to provide a roughly correct answer (see Appendices to Baumberg Geiger, In Press).

As a further step, we can compare perceptions of the value of benefits in Belgium vs. the
UK, based on two sets of similar questions in the 2014 Belgian National Election Study
(Swyngedouw et al., 2014) 4 and the UK studies reviewed in Baumberg Geiger (submitted): 5
-Approach 1: these surveys firstly ask if a single benefit claimant has enough to live
on (UK) or whether their benefits are too high/low (Belgium). Respondents are then
asked this again after hearing the actual amount of the benefit; if people become
more generous then this implies that they overestimated the real benefit level. In
Britain, 24% overestimate the benefit and 13% underestimate it (52% not changing
their view when given the true figure), whereas in Belgium, 33% overestimate the
benefit and 12% underestimate it.
-Approach 2: the surveys also ask directly for the estimated value of benefits received
by a couple (UK) or a single person (Belgium). Taking correct responses to be those
within a window of £25/pw (UK) or €100/pcm (Belgium) around the true value, 29%
give underestimates and 50% overestimates in the UK, whereas in Belgium 26% give
overestimates and 45% overestimates.
While there are some further differences between the surveys that make exact comparisons
difficult,6 benefit beliefs seem to be about as inaccurate in both countries – something which
is further supported by the similar inaccuracy of Belgians and Britons in estimating levels of
unemployment and long-term sickness (see Appendices to Baumberg Geiger, In Press).
Accurate benefits beliefs are clearly not a precondition of the more positive benefits attitudes
in Belgium (see Figure 2).
Moreover, even at the moments in history where the benefits system was being expanded,
hostile attitudes to some groups of claimants existed. For example, in the midst of the US
New Deal, there was “far more skepticism and outright hostility towards the safety net than
4 This post-electoral study was carried out among a register-based probability sample of Belgians
entitled to vote in the 2014 elections. The study consists of two surveys: a face-to-face survey
(response rate 47%), and a follow-up questionnaire to return via mail (which 74% of the initial
respondents did, leading to a sample size of 1403). The questions are as follows:
-“People who do not have sufficient means of subsistence in Belgium can obtain social
assistance from the OCMW. [Follow-up questionnaire only: In the case of a single person, the
social assistance benefit is currently 817 Euro per month]. Do you think that amount is too
high or too low?” Answer categories: 1 (Much too high) – 5 (Much too low)
-“People who do not have sufficient means of subsistence in Belgium can obtain social
assistance from the OCMW. There are few people who know exactly how much the social
assistance benefit is. Expressed in euros, how high do you estimate the social assistance
benefit is for someone who lives alone? You can always guess when you do not know the
correct amount.”
Both questions were originally given in the face-to-face survey; in order to avoid memory effects, the
question giving true value of benefit in question 1 was given in the follow-up survey.
5 The UK questions are given in Baumberg Geiger (submitted), Table 3 (for approach 1) and Table 1
(for approach 2).
6 The main differences are: (i) the Belgian questions refer to a benefit including housing costs (as
there is no separate housing benefit), whereas the UK questions explicitly exclude housing costs; (ii)
for approach 1, the Belgian questions are asked in two separate surveys (the follow-up question being
asked in a self-completion survey after the interview), whereas the British questions are asked directly
following one another; and (iii) the claimant types are different between countries for approach 2.

our admiring view of the policy history would suggest” (Newman & Jacobs, 2008). Hudson &
Lunt (this volume) likewise find such attitudes in the postwar consensus of 1960s Britain; for
example, they show that large majorities agreed that ‘many people are drawing
supplementary benefit/national assistance who could really be earning enough to support
themselves if they wanted to’. The same is true in the relatively generous systems of
present-day Scandinavia. For example, 68-73% of people in Scandinavian countries say that
people often look down on social assistance claimants (Albrekt Larsen, 2006:Table 6.2),
while 29-43% of Scandinavians agree that social benefits/services make people lazy, and
32-51% agree that many people manage to obtain benefits/services that they are not entitled
to.7
In fact, if we look across European countries, the perception of negative economic and moral
consequences is higher in those countries that have higher social expenditures (van
Oorschot et al., 2012:192). The perception of negative consequences across each country in
the ESS is shown below in Figure 2, and highlights that the Scandinavian countries are
unexceptional in their perception of negative consequences; it is clearly not the case such
attitudes present an insurmountable barrier to more generous welfare states. What van
Oorschot et al make clear, however, is that the perception of positive consequences of the
welfare state – preventing widespread poverty, creating a more equal society, and helping
people combine work and family – is higher still in these countries. As they put it, “a higher
spending welfare state promotes its social legitimacy by stimulating in people the idea that it
is doing a good job, more than that it arouses their worries about its effect on the economy
and morals.”
[Figure 2 about here]
Again, it is important to be clear on my argument here. I am not claiming that negative
attitudes towards benefits are equally high in Scandinavian countries as the UK, as Figure 2
makes clear (indeed, the same ESS data shows that far more Britons think that social
benefits/services make people lazy). Nor am I claiming that Scandinavian perceptions of
their benefits system are as erroneous as British perceptions (Britons perceive higher levels
of unemployment and long-term sickness compared to Swedes, for example, despite
Sweden having higher levels of both; Baumberg Geiger, In Press). Instead, I want to argue
that myths and perceptions of undeservingness are not unique to the UK, and can be found
even in times and places in which the benefits system is much more generous. What is
different in such settings is not whether such ideas exist to any great extent in society, but
how widespread they are, and how far they are balanced by widespread perceptions of more
positive consequences of the welfare state.
The ambivalence of benefits attitudes
What characterises attitudes to the benefits system, above all, is ambivalence. This seems
to be true of all countries at all times – even when the benefits system is generous and
popular, many people still have some concerns, as the previous section has shown. The
same is true in reverse for 21st century Britain: even though attitudes are usually felt to be
predominantly hostile, many people have positive elements to their attitudes to the benefits
system. For example, when last asked (in 2003), over half of people said that they were
7 Authors own analysis of weighted ESS data 2008.

proud of Britain’s social security system (and not just proud about the welfare state in
general). Nearly 80% of respondents agree that large numbers who are eligible for benefits
fail to claim them (both from BSA data in Baumberg et al., 2012:17). And there is relatively
widespread agreement in the ESS data in the previous section that the benefits system has
positive consequences in preventing widespread poverty (57%) and helping people combine
work and family (58%).
Another way of expressing this ambivalence is to look within a single country at how far
groups perceived to be deserving are supported compared to groups perceived to be
undeserving. In the UK in 2013, far more people thought there should be less spending on
unemployment benefits than though that spending should rise (49% less vs. 15% more). Yet
the same respondents also overwhelmingly thought there should be more spending on
disabled people who cannot work (4% less, 54% more) (Baumberg, 2014:9). This has visible
impacts on political debate, most recently with the (right-wing) Government’s attempt to cut a
(non-work-related) disability benefit by tightening the eligibility criteria. This faced
overwhelming public disagreement (two polls at the time put opposition to the policy at 70%
and 84%)8 and seems to have been scrapped in the light of a backbench rebellion and the
(partially-attributable) resignation of the Secretary of State (against what he argued to be a
policy imposed by the Treasury).9
Such differentiation according to deservingness judgements is by no means limited to the
UK; indeed, Wim van Oorschot has influentially argued that there is a universal ranking of
different claimant groups from most deserving to least deserving (van Oorschot, 2006).
Aarøe & Petersen (2014) have likewise argued that both Americans and Danes show a
similar ‘deservingness heuristic’, with citizens of both countries making similar judgements
about whether hypothetical claimants are worthy of support when given a clear sign about
their motivation to work. It is only when people are asked to form an opinion about benefits
claimants in the absence of clear deservingness clues that the expected US-Denmark
differences are visible.
The challenge in the UK is therefore not that negative attitudes exist, nor that there is little
support for claimants who are seen to be undeserving, nor even that there is ambivalence
about the benefits system – for all of these are universal. Rather, the challenge is that public
debate about benefits emphasises the negative side of this ambivalence at the expense of
the positive side, and emphasises undeserving claimants over deserving ones. Hence in
Figure 2, the balance of positive vs. negative perceived consequences of the welfare state is
higher in the Scandinavian countries than nearly every other European country, while the UK
in contrast has the most negative perceived balance of any country barring Slovakia and
Hungary (van Oorschot et al., 2012:188). This is reflected in media coverage: stories about
benefits in Britain are split between the positive and negative, while stories in the
Scandinavian press are usually positive (Larsen & Dejgaard, 2013).
8 See the YouGov poll 16-17 March at https://yougov.co.uk/news/2016/03/18/least-fair-budget-
omnishambles/ and the Ipsos MORI poll 19-22/3/2016 at https://www.ipsos-
mori.com/researchpublications/researcharchive/3713/George-Osbornes-satisfaction-ratings-equal-his-
worst-ever-following-budget.aspx#gallery[m]/2/
9 See http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-35848687

Conclusion
In this article, I have argued that some of the concerns of British progressives about how to
respond to myths and harsh benefit attitudes are misplaced. It is true that many benefit
myths are widespread in Britain, and that claimants are perceived more harshly than twenty
or thirty years ago – and there are also some signs that these myths and harsh attitudes are
linked. However, it is doubtful that ‘mythbusting’ will have large impacts on either of them.
Moreover, it is not clear that progressive benefits system reforms depend on wiping out
either myths or perceived undeservingness, as these can be found in more generous benefit
systems ranging from post-war Britain to present-day Scandinavia. At the population level,
people are fundamentally ambivalent about benefits systems, and what is critical is the
balance between the positive and negative aspects of this ambivalence. This is a different
starting point than most current debates on benefits in Britain, but one that is borne out by
the evidence, and takes the debates in a different direction.
This obviously leaves the question of how to influence this balance – but to avoid repeating
an argument I have previously made in this journal, I will only summarise this briefly here (for
a fuller argument, see Baumberg, 2012). The cornerstones of debates about benefits are
often set by the benefits system itself: some systems ‘open up’ questions of deservingness,
while others close them down (Albrekt Larsen, 2006). This still leaves some space to
‘reframe’ debates to support progressive reforms (Lakoff, 2014), but these need to resonate
with people’s existing beliefs, which are in turn partly structured by the present system.
While it is therefore impossible to take progressive leaps at first, it may be easier to take a
series of small steps that successively unlock the possibility of hitherto impossible changes.
This is something that Conservative politicians have appreciated (albeit with opposing aims),
setting in motion reforms in the 1980s that change public preferences and political
possibilities in the 2010s. As Margaret Thatcher once said, “it isn't that I set out on economic
policies… Economics are the method; the object is to change the heart and soul” (Thatcher,
1981).

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Table : Simulated population-level deservingness perceptions if
people held correct beliefs about the benefits system
Belief question
Deservingness
question
∆agree
if all
correct
PERCEPTIONS OF BENEFIT FRAUD
Fraud as % of welfare spending (1) Dependency culture -8.1%**
PERCEPTIONS OF SPENDING ON BENEFITS
Unemp as % of welfare budget Dependency culture -11.4%**
PERCEPTIONS OF LEVEL OF CLAIMS AMONG WORKING-AGE
POPULATION
Long-term sick & disabled as % of pop Many not entitled -7.4%**
Unemployed & looking for work as % of
pop Many not entitled -6.5%**
PERCEPTIONS OF VALUE OF BENEFITS
£ unemp benefit, couple+2 kids (1) Dependency culture 0.0%
£ incentive to take min wage job‡ Dependency culture 0.3%
Table adapted from Baumberg Geiger (In Press). Key: ** p<0.01, * p<0.05, + p<0.10; ‡
Major issues around the 'true' figure given, (1) Minor issues about the 'true value' given.
Models control for sex, age, age2, region, education, economic activity, and political
affiliation (see Baumberg Geiger, In Press for further details).

Figure : Trends in benefit attitudes in Britain since 1983
Source: British Social Attitudes survey (see Baumberg, 2014 for further details)

Figure : Perceived positive and negative consequences of the
welfare state across Europe
Adapted from van Oorschot et al (2012). Data are own analyse of ESS 2008 data; bars
show the average share of the population agreeing that social benefits/services have each
of five negative consequences (darker bars; items are placing too great a strain on the
economy, costing businesses too much in taxes/charges, making people lazy, making
people less willing to care for one another, making people less willing to look after
themselves/family) and each of three positive consequences (lighter bars; items are
preventing widespread poverty, leading to a more equal society, making it easier to combine
work & family).