Having wealthy neighbors may skew beliefs about overall wealth distribution

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-07/afps-hwn072115.php

Public Release: 22-Jul-2015
Association for Psychological Science

Wealthy people may be likely to oppose redistribution of wealth because they have biased information about how wealthy most people actually are, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The findings indicate that people use their own neighborhoods and communities as a gauge of how much wealth other people possess, leading wealthy people to perceive the broader population as being wealthier than it actually is.

"If you're rich, there's a good chance you know lots of other rich people and relatively few poor people; likewise, if you're poor, you're likely to know fewer wealthy people and more poorer ones," says study co-author Robbie Sutton. "Even if people think objectively and follow rules of statistical inference, richer and poorer people may be led, by the information available to them, to very different conclusions about how wealthy their fellow citizens are, on average, and how wealth is distributed across society."

"These results suggest that the rich and poor do not simply have different attitudes about how wealth should be distributed across society; rather, they subjectively experience living in different societies," adds psychological scientist Rael Dawtry at the University of Kent, the study's lead author. "In the relatively more affluent America inhabited by wealthier Americans, there is perhaps less need to distribute wealth more equally."

The findings suggest that attitudes toward wealth distribution stem from more than just an economic motivation to protect one's self-interest or a fiscally conservative political ideology - the information provided by our surrounding environment also plays an important role.

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Starting with household income, the researchers found evidence for a chain of associations: Household income was linked to estimated social-circle income, which was linked to estimated population income, which was linked to perceived fairness, which was finally linked to attitudes toward redistribution.

This chain-like relationship remained even after the researchers took participants' political orientation and perceived self-interest into account.

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"As richer and poorer people increasingly live segregated lives, the information available to becomes increasingly distorted, and increasingly different," he notes. "People are, effectively, living in an informational bubble, surrounded by people with incomes like theirs but unlike many other Americans'."