People reject unfairness but normalise inequality
About this Event
Part of the Inequalities Seminar Series
Speaker:
Dr Mario D. Molina , Assistant Professor, Social Research and Public Policy program, NYU Abu Dhabi
Economic inequality remains widely tolerated despite people's strong aversion to unequal opportunities to get ahead in society. Existing accounts attribute this general acceptance to limited public awareness of inequality. We propose an alternative explanation: people apply moral judgment to evaluate opportunity inequality but anchor their standards for acceptable outcome inequality to the disparities they encounter in their social environment. Across two pre-registered experiments---a U.S. behavioural game (N=3,335) and a UK vignette study (N=2,193) evaluating real-world income disparities---we independently manipulated opportunity inequality, outcome inequality, and---in the behavioural game---social position.
Results reveal a stark dissociation: participants consistently judged uneven playing fields as unfair and accordingly attributed success to structural rather than meritocratic factors, yet their tolerance for outcome inequality was largely unaffected by how those opportunities were distributed. Instead, individuals accepted prevailing hierarchies and normalized the extent of economic inequality they experienced, adopting it as a baseline for acceptable distributions---regardless of whether the economic outcomes arose from a level or tilted playing field. Moreover, advantaged individuals in the behavioural game perceived greater fairness, endorsed larger economic disparities, and attributed success more to talent. These findings establish a dual-track evaluative framework: people reject tilted playing fields but normalize the economic inequalities they produce.
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Where is it happening?
Event Location & Nearby Stays:
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