Primary Submission Category: Life-course/developmental
American Dreaming? Evaluating Trait Explanations for Health Inequalities by Race and Socioeconomic Status
Authors: Bruce Link, Ezra Susser, Pam Factor-Litvak, Barbara Cohn,
Presenting Author: Bruce Link*
In the context of strong cultural beliefs associated with the American Dream, a prominent body of scholarship asserts that traits like intelligence, self-confidence, and self-control play a pivotal role in the life-course emergence of health inequalities by race and socioeconomic status. Two claims are made. The first has been considered and debated for quite some time and asserts that traits like these are critical for educational and economic success – they lead to higher socioeconomic attainment. The second is that good health can be achieved, and disease avoided by exercising such beneficial traits in health-relevant circumstances across the life course – they lead to better health (Calvin et al. 2011, Deary 2020; Heckman 2006, Heckman 2013, Oi and Alwin 2017, Wraw, Deary, Gale, and Der 2015). While this two-part explanation of health inequalities has been prominently proposed as policy ready, strong supportive evidence is lacking. We use prospectively ascertained data from approximately 50-year-old Black and White study participants (N=605) whose mothers were recruited when they were pregnant with the participant. The data contain the requisite prospectively assessed measures of cognitive and non-cognitive traits (at age 9 and 15) as well as health, and socioeconomic status assessed across the life course. As such the data allow a strong test of trait explanations for health inequalities. Results show no evidence that traits are independently associated with adult health when adult SES is controlled or that they account for race or SES inequalities in health. Even though the American Dream idea assigns great prominence to individual traits results indicate a need to question claims that they are prominent in creating health inequalities across the life course.