PINQ · The psychology of inequality: Understanding the social, cognitive and motivational foundations of people's attitudes towards the distribution of power and resources in society.

The psychology of inequality: Understanding the social, cognitive and motivational foundations of people's attitudes towards the distribution of power and resources in society.

The current project aimed to address the problem of growing social inequality across the world. I approached this problem from the perspective that people’s attitudes about the distribution of resources in society plays a central role how societies address inequality. In democratic societies, public opinion matters – it affects whether people provide their elected representatives the mandate required to pursue policies that will reduce inequality. This is important because high levels of social inequality are associated with various negative outcomes at both the individual and societal level. Research shows that that people (a) generally prefer more equal societies, yet (b) oppose many of the redistributive measures aimed at reducing inequality. In other words, there is a principle-implementation gap in people's attitudes towards inequality. Psychological research offers insights that could help close the principle-implementation gap – showing that there are various social constraints, cognitive biases, and psychological motives that prevent people from supporting policies that align with their stated principles. Applying these insights to current work on inequality from sociology, political science and economics, I aimed to examine three aspects of the psychology of inequality: i.e., the (a) social, (b) cognitive and (c) motivational roots of people’s attitudes towards inequality. This multidisciplinary endeavour was designed to lay the foundation for research that could ultimately provide insights to policy makers, advocates and educators about how to communicate the problem of inequality to the general public in a way that maximizes awareness and engagement. This project yielded several new findings. On the first theme – the social roots of inequality attitudes – studies conducted during this project showed that one contributing factor to the principle-implementation gap in attitudes towards inequality is the ideological alignment that occurs when members of high-status groups engage in contact with each other, and avoid contact with disadvantaged groups. On the second theme – the cognitive roots of inequality attitudes – research from this project revealed that another contributing factor to the principle-implementation gap is a biased perception of the true nature of resource distribution in society among the beneficiaries of inequality. On the third theme – the motivational roots of attitudes inequality attitudes – research from this project revealed that a third set of contributing factors to the principle-implementation gap are people’s inherent psychological motives to (a) maintain the status quo (b) reduce threats to social cohesion and (c) reduce competition from other groups.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз