For instance:
- A recent Knight-Ridder poll of 1,200 registered voters showed that about 60% of those surveyed were pessimistic about the overall direction of the country's economy while an almost equal number were optimistic about their own personal finances, a response that was buried six paragraphs down in a Miami Herald report of the survey, which carried the headline "Economic anxiety now transcends class lines."
- In its annual poll on religious trends, Gallup asks these questions: "How important would you say religion is in your own life -- very important, fairly important, or not very important?" and "At the present time, do you think religion as a whole is increasing its influence on American life or losing its influence?" When asked about religion in their own lives, roughly 60% of adult Americans have responded pretty consistently in each of the past five years that religion is very important to them. During those same five years, almost 60% of adult Americans have also said that they believe religion is losing its influence. Trouble is, if the latter 60% had been right about religion's losing its influence year after year, the percentage of people who feel that it's very important in their own lives should have dropped. It didn't. That first 60% figure held steady.
What we're seeing is a halo effect, says Benjamin R. Barber, a political scientist at Rutgers University. "You know, people hate Congress except for their own congressperson. You read about layoffs, and you probably feel that your firm won't do that, but meanwhile you're reading stories that lead you to have a sense of foreboding not necessarily tied to anything in your own experience. That allows you to say, 'Hey, I'm exempt from all this.' Your immediate workplace doesn't give you any reason for anxiety, but the picture you're getting of the global workplace and NAFTA and downsizing makes you feel deeply anxious in some vague way."
The watercooler syndrome. You know the scenario. Four employees gather around the watercooler or coffeepot and listen to one among them gripe about how awful his job is. He's treated unfairly, never gets a competent review, and has a boss who doesn't say boo to him, let alone praise him for a job well done. You, on the other hand, are feeling pretty good about your job, your boss, your workplace -- as do, unbeknownst to you, the two other listeners. But rarely, if ever, do the others look the complainer in the eye and say, "Nah, that's just you. I know your work. You stink."
Instead, the tendency is to sympathize -- and worse, to join in on the complaining. The result: you leave the watercooler thinking not that one person hates his job (because he's bad at it) but that everybody but you does.
Whether it's at the watercooler, in the media, or from our politicians, we are fed a steady diet of lament about what's wrong with the institutions we depend on. Ours has become, as social critic Robert Hughes observed, "a culture of complaint." It's no wonder that the employee leaving the watercooler finds the positive results of a workplace poll running contrary to everything he's been hearing.
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6. What you see isn't what you get.
Each of the hypotheses tries to explain why the Inc./Gallup survey revealed such positive feelings about the economy at a time when any poll seemed destined to uncover the opposite. Yet even the pundits who find the results reasonable have a hard time accepting that the respondents are telling the whole story. "There's got to be some denial," says Professor Barber. "There's no way people can be exposed to this kind of insecurity and still feel so sound and convinced about their own relationship to their own jobs."
As we look around us -- hearing what we hear, reading what we read, seeing what we see -- we just can't bring ourselves to believe that workers are as positive as they appear to be about their own workplace and their role in it. How can they be, when we see how overworked and overwrought they are?
In his essay "Economy and Pleasure," in What Are People For? (North Point Press, 1990), writer and farmer Wendell Berry tells the story of a December day spent with his granddaughter, Katie: The two of them hitched a team of horses to a wagon and hauled soil to cover a barn floor. It was cold, and Berry let his granddaughter drive the team of horses for the first time:
She did very well, and she was proud of herself. She said that her mother would be proud of her, and I said that I was proud of her.
We completed our trip to the barn, unloaded our load of dirt, smoothed it over the barn floor, and wetted it down. By the time we started back up the creek road the sun had gone over the hill and the air had turned bitter. Katie sat close to me in the wagon, and we did not say anything for a long time. I did not say anything because I was afraid that Katie was not saying anything because she was cold and tired and miserable and perhaps homesick; it was impossible to hurry much, and I was unsure how I would comfort her.
But then, after a while, she said, "Wendell, isn't it fun?"
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Maybe, like Berry, we are too eager to project our recognition of big-picture tough circumstances onto our expectations about how people feel about their work.
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7. Who's to blame? Part 2
The real lesson of the Inc./Gallup survey, perhaps, is to show that people don't necessarily feel the same about their work and workplace as they do about their economic circumstances and prospects. They can feel betrayed by the country's economy and its effect on real wage levels. They can feel overwhelmed by the pace of change wrought by technological advances. But they can feel those things deeply without feeling unhappy with their jobs -- and without feeling that the problems are caused by their employers. "Is the American Worker Getting Shafted?" the U.S. News & World Report headline asks. Not according to the people who responded to our poll.
