This study examines the notion of how culture influences our understandings of economic issues, specifically as they relate to the poor. It uses a model developed by Mary Douglas and expanded by Michael Thompson, Richard Ellis, and Aaron Wildavsky, which focuses on the notions of grid and group to develop five prototype social games whose predictive dimensions help understand why people have contradictory understandings of the causes of and the solutions to poverty. The goals are to help Christians understand how significantly their cultural biases influence their thinking about the poor and to propose some guidelines for working together.
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