Nothing New Except: Development Focus Groups

One new nugget of truth on public beliefs about aid

“Aid gets wasted. I think we should be generous in principle, but there’s too much corruption”

“We should give some money sure, but aid is 30% of the budget and that’s far too much”

If you’ve worked in public engagement on development for more than five minutes, you’ve heard focus group feedback like this. If you’ve worked in public engagement on development for 35 years, you’ve heard endless focus group feedback like this.

And in fact, if you’ve worked in any form of redistributionist policy, you could replace ‘aid’ with ‘benefits’, or ‘social assistance’, and the feedback would be equally familiar.

Very generally, median beliefs on redistribution are consistent over time. People theoretically support helping others under specific conditions. Yet when these conditions are met, they often find another reason they don’t support redistribution.

When those specific conditions are ‘people like me’, support goes up. “Other people” waste money. On soda, cigarettes, Sky TV, junk food or whatever other topical small-but -luxury good that poor people shouldn’t be allowed.

And in any case, it’s not the principle of it, it’s the sheer amount of spending. For 40 years, the public has vastly over-estimated how much their governments spend on aid, welfare or direct benefits. And each country has a strawperson cause from which aid allegedly steals. In Canada, it’s clean water on indigenous reserves. In the UK, it’s the homeless.

“Once we solve homelessness here, then we can be generous to others”

“Great, so you support more funding for Housing First and addiction support?”

“Oh hell no, the lazy layabouts should get a job”

People’s views are inherently contradictory. They say aid is wasteful and corrupt, but also say it’s shameful to cut aid. They care about the moral stain when their country’s aid cuts lead to deaths. They are proud of ‘their’ aid workers helping others. When the question is framed right, we can get a poll with 85% support for aid increases. It’s a reminder that people individually are generally kind, fighting battles we know nothing about, and trying to do their best with what they have.

And so, when I saw new aid polling this month, I sighed a little because it was largely the same old. But then I saw a new concept buried at the bottom of a slide. It was glossed over, as an ancillary finding. But it’s a critical new insight.

It was an explicit statement that people no longer want to change their minds on aid. In the past, when provided with facts on aid during a focus group, people grudgingly acknowledged softening their opinions as a result. Yes reluctantly, because changing our minds is not a factual process and nobody likes to ‘admit’ to being wrong. But overall, for example, when told aid was actually only 1% of the government budget, they accepted this as proportionate. Or when told that their help saved the lives of 30,000 babies, they felt proud.

Apparently no longer. For the first time I’ve seen, people explicitly named what many of us have felt for some time. They do not want to be confronted with the facts, because they do not want to change their minds. They want their priors reinforced, and when provided with facts that run counter to their beliefs, the facts are either unwelcome or wrong.

Perhaps I’m too cynical, but I worry as voters turn inwards in the face of a frightening, fragile external environment, they’re encouraged to find comforting scapegoats in ‘others’. Immigrants, poor people, trans people, Black people, people in other countries. The comfort derived from this is protective, and for the first time, people are telling us openly they enjoy the feeling of having their (often racist, let’s be honest here) priors reinforced.

I suspect in part, we’re seeing the impact of our ability to seal ourselves in media echo chambers. Of our ability to curate a perfect information ecosystem that only feeds us comfort, and in doing so, pushes us further down an algorithm-driven ideological rabbit hole. It’s not just the phenomenon of watching a benign YouTube nature documentary and six suggested videos later, you’re somehow watching a rant about White Replacement Theory. I suspect it’s also the sycophantic style of Artificial Intelligence, and dark money funded outrage content across social media.

If this nugget is replicable, it begs the question, do we no longer consider as genuine the public’s conditions under which they’d support aid? Are our myth-busting efforts a fool’s errand? We used to think if we got the facts in front of people, they’d change their minds. The challenge was how to do that effectively and at scale. Now, the bigger challenge seems to be that people find it deeply comforting to indulge their priors, and are not just immune to facts, but facts may actually harden their existing their beliefs.