Abstract
There is evidence that in more economically unequal societies, social relations are more strained. We argue that this may reflect the tendency for wealth to become a more fitting lens for seeing the world, so that in economically more unequal circumstances, people more readily divide the world into “the haves” and “have nots.” Our argument is supported by archival and experimental evidence. Two archival analyses reveal that at times of greater inequality, books in the United Kingdom and the United States and news media in English-speaking countries were more likely to mention the rich and poor. Three experiments, two preregistered, provided evidence for the causal role of economic inequality in people’s use of wealth categories when describing life in a fictional society; effects were weaker when examining real economic contexts. Thus, one way in which inequality changes the world may be by changing how we see it.
Highlights
Everybody’s talkin’ about hard times . . . Fat cats on Wall Street They got a bailout While somebody else got to wait
To test our claim that there would be more references to wealth in language when economic inequality is high, we regressed the prevalence of the 35 wealth category words onto the income share owned by the top decile for the United Kingdom and the United States in turn
We included covariates to control for the possibility that the use of wealth category terms may be subject to temporal changes and affected by a country’s wealth (GDP, standardized)
Summary
Everybody’s talkin’ about hard times . . . Fat cats on Wall Street They got a bailout While somebody else got to wait. We aim to contribute to the social psychological analysis of economic inequality by examining a basic proposition, articulated by Jetten et al (2017), that inequality increases people’s tendencies to see the world through a lens of wealth. This proposition is an important one because, as work in the social identity tradition has demonstrated (Tajfel & Turner, 1979; Turner & Oakes, 1986), the tendency for people to categorize self and others into social groups is a building block for a broad range. It is that we are likely to pay more attention to social status in how we assess each other. (p. 44)
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