Perceptions of national wealth and skill influence pay expectations: replicating global hierarchy on a microscale.

Angela T Maitner,Jamie Decoster

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00703

Angela T Maitner, Jamie Decoster

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00703

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Abstract

In highly multicultural societies, the economic status hierarchy may come to mimic the hierarchy of global wealth, reinforcing social inequality by tying pay scales to national wealth. We investigated how nationality influences expectations of payment in the UAE. Participants reported how much they expected people to be paid and how much skill they were perceived to have by nationality. They also reported their perceptions of the national wealth of different countries. Participants generally expected Westerners to be paid more than Arabs, who would be paid more than Sub-Saharan Africans and Asians. Expectations about payment in private sector employment were driven by both actual and stereotyped differences in national wealth and skill, with non-Gulf Cooperation Council Arabs most likely to see national wealth as a factor explaining the economic hierarchy. These results suggest that people expect payment to be tied to national wealth, reflecting the global hierarchy on a microscale.

Highlights

This paper investigates how existing global inequality may be used to understand and explain status differences in a highly diverse society, focusing on how both perceptions of and actual differences in national wealth may be used to understand a nationality-based economic status hierarchy at a local level
This study investigates the contribution of actual nation characteristics (i.e., gross domestic product (GDP) per capita and mean education levels – reflecting the actual global hierarchy) and national stereotypes on expected salaries for employees with different nationalities
The statistics for rated pay, wealth, and skill were calculated based on the 5460 ratings, the counts for participant region were calculated based on the 195 reports from participants, and the statistics for actual GDP and amount of schooling were calculated based on the 28 reports from the rated nations

Summary

Introduction

For example, produces a gross domestic product (GDP) per capita of $102,100 while the Democratic Republic of the Congo has a GDP per capita of only $400 (The World Factbook, 2015). Such disparities have been tied to explanations ranging from differences in national intelligence (i.e., blaming the poor; Lynn and Vanhanen, 2006) to a history of colonization and neoliberal economic policies (i.e., blaming the rich; Hickel, 2013). The current work looks at how the simple existence of national wealth disparities, regardless of their cause, may help maintain global inequality in a single context. We investigate how perceived and actual merit, which has more commonly been examined as an ideological explanation for the position of disadvantaged group members (see Jost and Hunyady, 2005), influence individuals’ expectations of salary differences

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