When it comes to human welfare, debates surrounding deservedness or deservingness, who should get what and what they should have to do in order to get it, have arguably been omnipresent, taking in discourses surrounding sturdy beggars, the able-bodied and impotent poor, the deserving versus the undeserving, up to and including formalisation via the workhouse test and its direct descendant the means test (Beresford, 2016; Dukelow and Considine, 2017; Glennerster, 2017; Powell, 1992; Whelan, 2021b). This type of thinking has become firmly entrenched and enmeshed in the fabric of societies, in the liberal welfare states of the Anglosphere world at least, and has affected the participants interviewed for this study. Consequently, it is something to which many of the participants have given voice. As well as voicing awareness and opinions as they relate to deservedness, many of the participants have tended to deal with the question of their own deservedness in a particular way and using particular strategies. Essentially, this has devolved on a tendency to engage in the ‘othering’ of other welfare recipients, which is then coupled with a tendency to justify their own recipiency. As will be seen, this is clearly a complex psychological and sociological area for the participants interviewed here. Engaging in the othering of other welfare recipients denotes a value position that may be out of sync with or contradictory to the personal circumstances of those engaged in othering, hence the subsequent need for distancing or self-justification. It is a practice that clearly forms part of the contemporary welfare experience and, as such, there is a cognate literature (see Shildrick and MacDonald, 2013; Bratton, 2015; Garthwaite, 2016; Pemberton et al, 2016; Patrick, 2016, 2017; Welfare Conditionality, 2019) that documents this, thus illustrating the ‘shared typical’ nature of these phenomena. On the basis that othering is a practice that forms part of the contemporary welfare experience, the question of why this is so still remains, that is, why do welfare recipients engage in the othering of other welfare recipients? Patrick (2016, 2017), has addressed this directly and has conceptualised engagement in these practices as a form of ‘citizenship from below’.