‘You come back fighting. That’s what gives you the drive to achieve’: The extraordinary psychological construction of the super-rich in entertainment documentaries

Philippa Carr; Simon Goodman; Adam Jowett; Jackie Abell

doi:10.1177/09579265211013117

‘You come back fighting. That’s what gives you the drive to achieve’: The extraordinary psychological construction of the super-rich in entertainment documentaries

Philippa Carr
, Simon Goodman
, Adam Jowett
, Jackie Abell

Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience

University of the West of England
De Montfort University

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

18 Citations (Scopus)

127 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

Inequality in society is legitimised through the ‘meritocracy myth’ and existing research claims that the affluence of the super-rich is the result of their superior traits. Discursive Social Psychology examines the ways in which psychological concepts such as personality traits function in talk. This research explores how entertainment documentaries construct the traits of the super-rich to legitimise their wealth. A corpus of 41.5 hours of terrestrial UK televised broadcasts that used the term, ‘super-rich’ was analysed. This explored how wealthy individuals are presented as having superior psychological qualities compared to the general public in relation to their greater drive and resilience. However, wealthy individuals also talk about the development of superior traits as a response to adversity. Entertainment documentaries draw upon individualistic ideology to present wealth inequality as a natural consequence of individual differences and as a result, the current distribution of wealth is ‘just’ despite its negative consequences for all.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	559-574
Number of pages	16
Journal	Discourse & Society
Volume	32
Issue number	5
Early online date	5 May 2021
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1177/09579265211013117
Publication status	Published - Sept 2021

Bibliographical note

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).

Keywords

discourse analysis
discursive social psychology
distribution of wealth
documentaries
entertainment
ideology
inequality
meritocracy
super-rich
traits
wealth

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Communication
Language and Linguistics
Sociology and Political Science
Linguistics and Language

Access to Document

10.1177/09579265211013117Licence: CC BY

PublishedFinal published version, 285 KBLicence: CC BY

Cite this

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abstract = "Inequality in society is legitimised through the {\textquoteleft}meritocracy myth{\textquoteright} and existing research claims that the affluence of the super-rich is the result of their superior traits. Discursive Social Psychology examines the ways in which psychological concepts such as personality traits function in talk. This research explores how entertainment documentaries construct the traits of the super-rich to legitimise their wealth. A corpus of 41.5 hours of terrestrial UK televised broadcasts that used the term, {\textquoteleft}super-rich{\textquoteright} was analysed. This explored how wealthy individuals are presented as having superior psychological qualities compared to the general public in relation to their greater drive and resilience. However, wealthy individuals also talk about the development of superior traits as a response to adversity. Entertainment documentaries draw upon individualistic ideology to present wealth inequality as a natural consequence of individual differences and as a result, the current distribution of wealth is {\textquoteleft}just{\textquoteright} despite its negative consequences for all.",

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‘You come back fighting. That’s what gives you the drive to achieve’: The extraordinary psychological construction of the super-rich in entertainment documentaries

Abstract

Bibliographical note

Keywords

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Access to Document

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