From wages to walls

How the changing politics of the domestic space means we need to rethink behaviour change programmes

The Amazon TV series The Girlfriend follows a wealthy man who becomes romantically involved with Cherry, a woman from a less privileged background. While on the surface the story is a psychological thriller about love, deceit, and class tension, the subtext is the notion of the home, and how an outsider’s presence can unsettle the existing order within it. Similarly, this is what the 2023 film Saltburn was about: both are stories of walls thought to be secure being breached and outsiders slipping through.

These cultural stories can be called on to highlight something beyond a gripping drama - they illustrate a societal shift. There is an argument that affluence and legitimacy were once grounded in the workplace; today, it is increasingly apparent that the domestic environment has become a new frontier for playing out our financial lives and political positions. Our homes, via property, inheritance, and housing markets, now represent new battle lines, with accompanying vulnerabilities and anxieties.

As writer Alva Gotby argues in her most recent book, domestic life was once thought to be quite separate from our wider economic lives, while today, as we will set out, it seems central to it. Of course, the home has long been a site where economic and emotional life intersect, where labour is reproduced, care is performed, and social order is maintained. But what has changed is its centrality in political life.

This means that homes are not neutral containers for private life; in fact, scholars have long shown how the built environment encodes political visions of who belongs, how families should live, and what relationships are valued. In fact, the ‘ideal’ single-family house, with its private bedrooms, fenced gardens, and self-contained domestic unit, emerged from nineteenth-century middle-class ideals that aimed to naturalise the nuclear family and the passing of property through inheritance. This did not merely reflect social order but also helped to produce it, embedding privacy and ownership as cultural norms.

For those working in behaviour change and policy design, this matters a great deal. This is because the home is not a neutral space of decision-making, but a site where economic structures and moral expectations meet. All of which implies that we need to consider the embedded politics within the house and map how they influence engagement and behaviour; we argue that any programme hoping to change household behaviour that ignores this can risk failure.

From labour to living space

To unpack these assertions about the home, Gotby explains how the industrial era conferred legitimacy on certain groups in the population: their financial well-being was justified by claims to enhanced productivity, innovation, or management. Workers, too, could imagine upward mobility via labour or union power. But increasingly these certainties are eroding: stable employment is giving way to short contracts, wages have barely moved, and insecurity defines more and more lives.

And if the traditional connection between work and reward has weakened, and stable, well-paid employment is no longer the primary route to security or status for many, then advantage increasingly depends on access to assets, particularly housing and inheritance. To this end, homes have been financialised, transformed into speculative assets and rental streams.

But if advantage is now maintained less through labour and more through the ownership of assets such as housing and inheritance, then claims to social legitimacy (via meritocracy) are surely much harder to sustain.

This is because property-based affluence very tangibly exposes inequality rather than disguising it: it depends on prior ownership, inheritance, and exclusion. For the very well-off, then, maintaining moral credibility requires concealing this dependence. This, says Gotby, is done via the language of taste, stability, and family responsibility, with property ownership being reframed as ‘good’, a sign of prudence, discipline, or good citizenship rather than structural privilege.

In fact, following this argument, the household now performs much of the social and ideological work once performed by the workplace. Where once it was the factory or office that taught dominant societal values, now it is the home that increasingly carries this burden: property ownership becomes proof of responsibility, inherited advantage is framed as good planning or hard work, and caring for family is seen as a virtue.

In this way, ownership and privilege are reinterpreted through a virtuous moral lens, with a whole set of societal expectations. The social and economic inequalities that, in fact, underpin this are harder to spot as they have been turned into everyday moral behaviour of ‘good people’.

As academic David Harvey and others have noted, housing is “capital fixed in space”: not only a way of absorbing investment but materialising particular ideas of citizenship and belonging. From Victorian slum clearances to Thatcher’s “Right to Buy,” the built environment has been repeatedly remade to express and stabilise the dominant social and political relations of the day.

Homes and privacy

Given that housing is a very tangible expression of inequality, it is no wonder that its design has long served as a means of maintaining privacy via control and surveillance. Estates, corridors, gated entrances, and concierge desks operate as ‘architectures of exclusion’, transforming inequality into something that appears like ‘good design’ rather than a political choice.

In this sense, (with reference to Gotby,) privacy disguises the everyday mechanisms on which affluence and comfort rest: the labour, inheritance, and social advantage that can underpin a household. For the well-off, privacy is arguably more important than ever as it not only protects possessions but also the illusion that their position is self-made.

That this is important is perhaps reflected in popular culture, where anxieties about the fragility of this privacy privilege seem to be a recurring theme. In Saltburn, scholarship student Oliver Quick struggles to fit in at the University of Oxford because of his inexperience with upper-class manners. He befriends Felix Catton, an affluent and popular student who invites him to spend the summer at his family’s country house, Saltburn. Oliver learns the rhythms of the household, mirrors the family’s tastes and manners (both hidden from view to the broader public) and manipulates their sympathies to secure his place within the home. His charm grants him access to both emotional and physical spaces that were never meant to be shared with outsiders.

The stately home itself is designed to enforce separation with long drives and locked gates that set out who belongs and who merely visits. Architectural features such as grand entrance halls, private wings, and servant corridors materialise hierarchy, keeping the labour that sustains privilege out of sight. Yet in Saltburn, these boundaries fail. The estate becomes prised open, its private rituals exposed to imitation and manipulation by Oliver.

In The Girlfriend, Cherry is initially portrayed as the wronged outsider, unfairly judged by a very affluent family. But by the final scenes, her deceptions and manipulations are revealed, exposing how easily an ‘intruder’ can disguise themselves to enter what appears to be a safe, private world. The family’s modern home, consisting of glass walls, open-plan spaces, and minimalist design, is meant to project taste and control. Yet these same features mean that every movement is visible, every conversation overheard. What was designed to display confidence instead leaves its inhabitants constantly on show, their domestic life as transparent as the architecture around them.

And when outsiders violate the once private household, the response can be visceral, as both Cherry and Oliver found to their cost. Jonathan Haidt’s moral foundations theory explains this by linking privacy intrusion to notions of purity and sanctity: breaches of the private home can feel like contamination, not just disruption.

And this also aligns with Paul Rozin’s research on disgust as a ‘boundary emotion’, where the response helps guard the body and the family from what feels contaminating or out of place.

This supports a Gotby perspective, with the incursions saying less about the threat posed by outsiders and more about the unease of those inside, an awareness that their comfort and security rest on what are perceived as fragile foundations of ownership and exclusion. This same sentiment was expressed by billionaire Nick Hanauer when, in an open letter, he warned that:

“If we don’t do something to fix the glaring inequities in this economy, the pitchforks are going to come for us plutocrats.”

In this sense, the fear that someone like Cherry or Oliver evokes is the fear of exposure, an acknowledgement that privilege in fact rests on fragile foundations.

Property, and the politics of change

If a behavioural lens is to account for these dynamics, it must move beyond treating the household as a simple unit of analysis. As we noted, domestic life now performs much of the ideological work once done by the workplace: it is where inequality is normalised and moralised through everyday acts of ownership, care, and responsibility. But these processes look very different depending on one’s relationship to wealth and property.

For the affluent, the home represents control and insulation, a private space where social and economic advantage can be performed as moral virtue. Through the management of domestic order, sustainability, and taste, the affluent transform economic privilege into evidence of character and ‘stewardship’. Installing heat pumps, recycling diligently, or investing in long-term financial planning for inheritance becomes a way to demonstrate these values. Such actions are not only about reducing emissions or saving money, but about maintaining a sense of worth and belonging in an economy where the link between work and moral legitimacy has weakened.

At the same time, this sense of stewardship can turn into defensiveness. When interventions such as smart meters, mandatory energy audits, or housing regulation appear to threaten autonomy, they are resisted as intrusions into private life. The same desire to perform virtue through domestic responsibility thus coexists with a fear of surveillance or loss of control. What we might interpret as ‘inertia’ or ‘status quo bias’ can instead be seen as a form of protection, a defence of a space where personal sovereignty still feels possible.

For those without wealth, these dynamics take another form. Renters, precarious workers, and those in shared or temporary housing live with limited privacy and agency. Their homes are not sites of moral display but of constant negotiation, with landlords, neighbours, and the state. In these contexts, sustainability initiatives that assume autonomy or disposable income can feel irrelevant or moralising. Installing a heat pump or retrofitting insulation is rarely a matter of choice; it depends on ownership structures and access to capital. Even everyday acts like recycling are shaped by material constraints, lack of space, poor waste infrastructure, or time poverty, yet are often interpreted as signs of moral failure.

This means that interventions designed for ‘households’ often reproduce the very hierarchies they seek to address. Among the wealthy, behavioural programmes can reinforce moral self-regard, rewarding those already able to act. Among the less wealthy, they can intensify the burden of having to take personal responsibility in systems designed to limit it. The same policy, framed as empowerment, can thus produce guilt, shame, or disengagement depending on who receives it.

For behavioural science, this underscores the need to move beyond individualist framings of choice or habit. The home is not a neutral container for decision-making; instead, it is an emotional and political infrastructure that distributes autonomy unevenly. Designing effective interventions, therefore, requires attention to how these inequalities shape both motivation and meaning.

Behaviour does not unfold in a vacuum, but within systems of property, politics, and power. This is what Saltburn and The Girlfriend dramatise so effectively. The intrusion of an outsider, whether Oliver or Cherry, does not merely threaten privacy; it reveals the mechanisms that are otherwise hidden from everyday view.

Conclusions

For those with an interest in behaviour change, these narratives underscore that the household is not a passive backdrop to social life but a place where inequality, legitimacy, and aspiration are continually negotiated. This means that a recycling campaign, financial planning, or a home-energy programme may be technically sound may well falter if they clash with people’s lived experiences of ownership, precarity, or fairness.

It seems we need a politically informed behavioural science that not only references nudges but also structures. It recognises that behaviour is mediated by class, gender, and geography as much as by individual motivation or cognitive bias. And on this basis, it understands the household as a microcosm of broader social and political negotiation.