'I suffered, so should you': Why self-made achievers pull up the ladder behind them

A new study has found that people who achieved success through hardship are actually more likely to oppose measures that would spare others from the same struggle — not less.

The finding runs counter to the popular belief that those who have suffered tend to empathize with others facing similar difficulties. Instead, the research shows that humans instinctively "pull up the ladder" behind them to protect the perceived value of their own hard-won achievements.

The study was published in PNAS Nexus, an international journal of the National Academy of Sciences, by a joint research team comprising Michelle Yoosun Kim, a professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong's business school; Ayelet Gneezy, a professor at the Rady School of Management at UC San Diego; and Alex Imas, a professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

The team named the psychological mechanism behind this behavior the "pulling up the ladder" effect and demonstrated it through three controlled experiments combining laboratory settings and real-world immigrant community data.

Conventional wisdom holds that people who have overcome hardship are more likely to show compassion toward others facing the same difficulties. It is why politicians and aid organizations often put forward individuals who have triumphed over adversity when appealing for donations or policy support.

Reality, however, tells a different story. Prior research has shown that self-made wealthy individuals tend to oppose wealth redistribution more strongly than those born into privilege. And the fiercest opposition to minimum wage increases has often come, perhaps surprisingly, from workers earning just one tier above the minimum wage.

The research team drew a distinction between two types of hardship. The first is "incidental adversity" — suffering with no direct link to a specific achievement, such as surviving a natural disaster. The second is "instrumental adversity" — hardship that is a required step toward a goal, such as completing a medical residency.

The team hypothesized that people who endured instrumental adversity come to see that suffering as inseparable from the value of what they achieved. If someone else reaches the same outcome without going through the same ordeal, the original achiever feels their hard-won success has been cheapened.

The team ran three experiments to test the hypothesis.

The first compared attitudes toward immigration policy among Hispanic Americans, contrasting native-born citizens with naturalized ones of the same ethnic background. Naturalized citizens expressed stronger agreement with tightening border controls and entry screening.

The second experiment had participants solve puzzles while exposed to irritating noise. One group was told they would "receive" a token for completing the puzzle; the other was told they would "earn" one.

Despite enduring the same noise, participants in the instrumental adversity group — those who believed they had "earned" their reward through effort — were far less likely to support a proposal to remove the noise for future participants.

The third experiment was more direct. Participants were asked to solve seven puzzles under noisy conditions to earn a commemorative T-shirt. They were then told that future participants would receive the same T-shirt after solving just one puzzle.

Those who had struggled to earn their T-shirt subsequently rated its monetary value lower — as if the easier path for others had diminished what they had received. Participants who solved the puzzles in a comfortable environment, with sounds like ocean waves playing, rated their T-shirt's value the same regardless of whether the bar was lowered for others.

The research team said the behavior was not driven by a sense of procedural unfairness, but by a psychological defense mechanism — a feeling that measures reducing others' suffering threaten the scarcity and value of one's own success.

The research team said the psychology at work extends well beyond immigration policy.

The same mindset, they said, explains why senior club members insist on maintaining harsh hazing rituals for newcomers, why veteran doctors resist reducing the grueling workload of junior residents, and why people who have already paid off their student loans oppose debt relief for others — all rooted in the logic of "I went through it, so you should too."

However, the team was clear that the effect does not stem from a lack of empathy. "Even when hardship was originally due to circumstance, people tend to reinterpret it later as their own achievement," the researchers said. "The ladder-pulling psychology may occur far more commonly than we think."

DOI: 10.1093/pnasnexus/pgag128

Michelle Yoosun Kim, Ayelet Gneezy, Alex Imas, Pulling up the ladder: Enduring adversity increases opposition to reform, PNAS Nexus, Volume 5, Issue 6, June 2026, pgag128.