Trust is the social glue that holds society together. The academic consensus is that trust is weaker among lower-class individuals and in unequal regions/countries, which is often considered a thre...
Social class and power inequalities are defining features of current societies and tend to influence several social psychological processes. Two types of consequences of social class and power inequalities can be differentiated: mechanical and contextual. Mechanical effects occur when inequality strengthens the relation between social class or power and a given outcome; conversely, contextual effects occur when inequality creates a social context that changes the relationship between social clas...
: In many disciplines researchers use longitudinal panel data to investigate the potentially causal relationship between 2 variables. However, the conventions and concerns vary widely across disciplines. Here we focus on 2 concerns, that is: (a) the concern about random effects versus fixed effects, which is central in the (micro)econometrics/sociology literature; and (b) the concern about grand mean versus group (or person) mean centering, which is central in the multilevel literature associate...
Last. Adam Alic(UBC: University of British Columbia)H-Index: 2
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Social mobility is limited in most industrialized countries, and especially in the United States: Children born to relatively poor parents are less likely to prosper than other children. This obser...
Last. Dario Spini(UNIL: University of Lausanne)H-Index: 21
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Following the status-anxiety hypothesis, the psychological consequences of income inequality should be particularly severe for economically vulnerable individuals. Oddly, however, income inequality is often found to affect vulnerable low-income and advantaged high-income groups equally. We argue that economic vulnerability is better captured by a financial-scarcity measure and hypothesize that income inequality primarily impairs the psychological health of people facing scarcity. First, repeated...
Abstract Does income inequality reduce social trust? Although both popular and scholarly accounts have argued that income inequality reduces trust, some recent research has been more skeptical, noting these claims are more robust cross-sectionally than longitudinally. Furthermore, although multiple mechanisms have been proposed for why inequality could affect trust, these have rarely been tested explicitly. I examine the effect of state-level income inequality on trust using the 1973–2012 Genera...
Last. Miguel Moya(UGR: University of Granada)H-Index: 30
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Social class is a multifaceted social category that shapes numerous states and psychological processes, as well as the manner in which we relate to others. Trust, on the other hand, is a prerequisite for the initiation and maintenance of satisfactory social relationships. With 899 participants of both sexes drawn from the general population, this study examined the relationship between membership in a particular social class and three different types of trust: generalized, interpersonal, and dep...
Laypeople's beliefs about the current distribution of outcomes such as income and wealth in their country influence their attitudes toward issues ranging from taxation to healthcare — but how accurate are these beliefs? We review the burgeoning literature on (mis)perceptions of inequality. First, we show that people on average misperceive current levels of inequality, typically underestimating the extent of inequality in their country. Second, we delineate potential causes of these misperception...
Last. Jacinth J. X. Tan(UCSF: University of California, San Francisco)H-Index: 8
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By some accounts, global economic inequality is at its highest point on record. The pernicious effects of this broad societal trend are striking: Rising inequality is linked to poorer health and well-being across countries, continents, and cultures. The economic and psychological forces that perpetuate inequality continue to be studied, and in this theoretical review, we examine the role of daily experiences of economic inequality—the communication of social class signals between interaction par...
In this paper, we review and integrate the contemporary literature on the societal effects of income inequality, drawing on social, personality, developmental, and organizational psychology, sociology, political science, economics, and public health. Living in highly unequal regimes is associated with both increased mistrust and increased anxiety about social status; these psychological mechanisms help explain some of the negative outcomes associated with income inequality, such as lower happine...
Abstract Income inequality has been contentious for millennia, a source of political conflict for centuries, and is now widely feared as a pernicious “side effect” of economic progress. But equality is only a means to an end and so must be evaluated by its consequences. The fundamental question is: What effect does a country's level of income inequality have on its citizens' quality of life, their subjective well-being? We show that in developing nations inequality is certainly not harmful but p...
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