Infectious hardship

About

Infectious hardship is a social belief that anyone who helps someone who is experiencing hard times may soon experience those same troubles – as if hardship were an infectious disease – and therefore doing so is socially harmful. This belief can become self-fulfilling within a community in that if a few people believe it, then they will shun anyone who helps others, which will then result in those people experiencing hard times as well (even if not for the same reason as those they are helping).

This kind of thinking is characteristic of right wing ideology.

It probably originates as a form of association fallacy, possibly combined with zero-sum thinking which ignores the idea that something may be of much more value to one person than to another (marginal value), thus allowing the possibility that one person giving something to another person may result in a net increase in wealth.