How Information about Inequality Impacts Belief in Meritocracy: Evidence from a Randomized Survey Experiment in Australia, Indonesia and Mexico

Jonathan J B Mijs,Christopher Hoy

doi:10.1093/socpro/spaa059

Jonathan J B Mijs, Christopher Hoy

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1093/socpro/spaa059

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Abstract

AbstractMost people misperceive economic inequality. Learning about actual levels of inequality and social mobility, research suggests, heightens concerns but may push people’s policy preferences in any number of directions. This mixed empirical record, we argue, reflects the omission of a more fundamental question: under what conditions do people change their understanding of the meritocratic or non-meritocratic causes of inequality? To explore mechanisms of belief change we field a unique randomized survey experiment with representative populations in Australia, Indonesia, and Mexico—societies with varying levels of popular beliefs about economic inequality. Our results highlight the importance of information, perceived social position, and self-interest. In Indonesia, information describing (high) income inequality and (low) social mobility rocked our participants’ belief in meritocracy. The same information made less of a splash in Mexico, where unequal outcomes are commonly understood as the result of corruption and other non-meritocratic processes. In Australia, the impact of our informational treatment was strongest when it provided justification for people’s income position or when it corrected their perception of relative affluence. Our findings reveal asymmetric beliefs about poverty and wealth and heterogeneous responses to information. They are a call to rethink effective informational and policy interventions.

Highlights

Learning about actual levels of inequality and social mobility, research suggests, heightens concerns but may push people’s policy preferences in any number of directions. This mixed empirical record, we argue, reflects the omission of a more fundamental question: under what conditions do people change their understanding of the meritocratic or non-meritocratic causes of inequality? To explore mechanisms of belief change we field a unique randomized survey experiment with representative populations in Australia, Indonesia, and Mexico—societies with varying levels of popular beliefs about economic inequality
Prior research describes how people underestimate the level of economic inequality and misperceive the extent of social mobility characterizing their society (Alesina et al 2018; Cheng and Wen 2019; Hauser and Norton 2017), be it because of the class-biased vantage point through which they perceive and experience social life (Dawtry et al 2015; Mijs 2019), inaccurate news reporting (McCall 2013), or the perpetuation of meritocratic myths in popular media (Kim 2019)
Based on randomized survey experiments in Australia, Indonesia, and Mexico, we find support for three mechanisms through which people’s beliefs about inequality change depending on the information presented to them

Summary

Introduction

Explanations of wealth varied with participants’ own income position in the expected direction: people at the lower end of the income distribution who learned about the extent of social mobility and wealth inequality in their society were more likely to attribute economic success to non-meritocratic factors than participants at the upper end of the income distribution who received the same treatment.

Results

Conclusion