In our work, we tried to understand the impact of severe recessions on an individual’s beliefs, attitudes and political behavior. There is a lot of anecdotal evidence that economic crisis can have a traumatic effect on people’s psychology and attitudes: The experience of the Great Depression had a large impact on people and helped forge the social beliefs and attitudes that sustained political systems for many years. The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men were both written during the Great Depression, and both illustrate how economic crises can have a traumatic effect on peoples’ psychology and attitudes. The last financial crisis has also left deep scars, which will affect the economy for many years to come.

We studied the impact of recessions on economic and political beliefs, using data from the General Social Survey, a nationally representative sample that has gathered information on attitudes in the United States since 1972. The basic idea was to match macroeconomic shocks during early adulthood with self-reported answers from the General Social Survey.

We found that recessions alter permanently economic beliefs and political behavior, especially for people who experienced a recession between the ages of 18 to 25 — the so-called impressionable years — during which social psychologists think most of our social beliefs are formed. The effects are not so strong when recessions are experienced later in life.

Individuals who experienced a recession expressed a stronger preference for government redistribution, tended to believe that success in life was more a matter of luck rather than hard work, and were more likely to vote for a Democratic president. These effects are permanent, because attitudes of individuals who experienced a recession were altered many years after the recession ended.

We also found a similar pattern when we used data from the World Value Survey, covering 37 countries.