Paper Publication Spotlight #3 – The psychological imprint of inequality: Economic inequality shapes achievement and power values in human life

 

Du, H., Götz, F. M., King, R. B., & Rentfrow, P. J. (2022). The psychological imprint of inequality: Economic inequality shapes achievement and power values in human life. Journal of Personality. https://doi.org/10.1111/jopy.12758

 

Economic inequality is on the rise, affecting more than two-thirds of the global population (UN News, 2020). Concerns about increasing levels of economic inequality have been expressed by ordinary citizens as well as by religious leaders, politicians, and academics (Pew Research Center, 2014). On the other hand, others stress the potential bright side of inequality. For example, inequality may in fact instill hope in people (Hirschman & Rothschild, 1973): when there is rising income inequality, some people will experience steep increases in incomes, while others who observe this may hope that their own incomes will rise in a similar fashion, too (Cheung, 2016). Therefore, economic inequality may not always be negative and can even be preferred, if unequal distributions are perceived as fair (Starmans et al., 2017).

This research investigates how economic inequality shapes basic human values across three cross-national, cross-regional, and longitudinal studies. First, it examines the relationship between objective economic inequality and values across 77 societies from all five continents. Then, it examines the relationship between objective economic inequality and values across 51 regions in the United States. Lastly, it uses a two-year longitudinal design to examine the relationship between perceived economic inequality and values.

Results from multilevel modeling and longitudinal analysis suggested that people who lived in areas with higher economic inequality and who perceived higher economic inequality were more likely to endorse achievement and power values. Moreover, people who perceived higher economic inequality were less likely to endorse benevolence values. These findings suggest that economic inequality may act as an antecedent of self-enhancement values, particularly within countries. In a world of rising economic inequality, this may over time lead to an overemphasis on achievement and power which have been shown to erode social cohesion.