An Evaluation of Common Explanations for the Impact of Income Inequality on Life Satisfaction

Schalembier, Benjamin

doi:10.1007/s10902-018-9970-6

Cited by 20 publications

(9 citation statements)

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“…Oshio and Urakawa (2014) posit that perceived inequality "links actual income inequality to SWB". Yet, perceived and actual inequality have often been found to correlate moderately or weakly (Loveless 2013;Schalembier 2019), possibly because factors like media attention (Hauser and Norton 2017), political ideologies, and personal experiences (Du and King 2022), may shift perceptions away from the reality. Besides relative deprivation, actual and perceived inequality have different correlates that may drive their respective effects on SWB through other mechanisms.…”

Section: Contributions To Research On Income Inequalitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Favorite Possessions Protect Subjective Well-Being Under Income Inequality

Liu¹,

Dalton²,

Mukhopadhyay³

2023

Journal of Marketing Research

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Rising income inequality is taking a toll on people’s subjective wellbeing (SWB), and many commentators have implicated the role of material possessions, and thereby marketing, in this regard. Making a more nuanced argument, the present research proposes that certain material possessions – namely, favorite possessions – can mitigate the detrimental psychological effect of income inequality on SWB. In support of this proposition, experimental data from nine countries (N=3,687) and social media posts from 138 countries (N=31,332) converge to show that, while SWB generally declines as income inequality increases, encouraging consumers to attend to their favorite possessions can mitigate the negative effect of inequality on SWB. This is because attending to favorite possessions reduces consumers’ tendency to make social comparisons related to material resources and wealth, which otherwise arise when income inequality is high. Consequently, even when they perceive high income inequality, consumers feel less deprived relative to others, thereby buffering their SWB. These findings have meaningful consumer welfare implications. In particular, one way consumers can feel happier with their quality of life in an unequal society is to avoid comparing their material wealth to that of others and instead attend to the material possessions that are most special to them.

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Section: Contributions To Research On Income Inequalitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Favorite Possessions Protect Subjective Well-Being Under Income Inequality

Liu¹,

Dalton²,

Mukhopadhyay³

2023

Journal of Marketing Research

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“…Different indicators of social mobility have been adopted in previous studies. Some studies measured social mobility by asking participants to indicate their perceived social mobility (e.g., Schalembier, 2019), which is rather subjective. Some studies measured social mobility by using the intergenerational difference in educational attainment or income (e.g., García-Munoz et al, 2019), which is limited in fully capturing social mobility that is related to a broader range of domains (e.g., health, education, work, and institutions).…”

Section: Social Mobilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Social Mobility and Motivational Payoff: Achievement Motivation Is More Important in Students’ Performance and Well-Being in Cultures With High Versus Low Social Mobility

Lou,

2023

Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology

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Achievement motivation encompasses a well-establish distinction between the motive to avoid failure (e.g., fear of failure) and the orientation to improve competence (e.g., mastery goal). But how well do they generalize across cultures in understanding students’ performance and well-being? We argue that students’ achievement motivation is less pronounced in societies characterized by low (vs. high) social mobility, where people have fewer opportunities to change their social status. To test this hypothesis, we analyzed a cross-national data set ( n = 498,362 high-school students from 65 regions) using multilevel modeling. The results indicated that societal-level social mobility significantly moderated the role of (a) mastery goals and fear of failure on academic performance and (b) fear of failure on well-being. These associations were stronger in societies with high (vs. low) social mobility, suggesting that students derive greater academic benefits from mastery goals and fear of failure in societies with higher social mobility. In such societies, however, fear of failure also poses a stronger hindrance to students’ well-being. These findings highlight that the same type of motivation may operate differently across cultures and that socioecological environments may influence the motivational impacts on learning and well-being.

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“…Using the European Values Survey, Schalembier (2019) analysed the effect of a society's actual and perceived income inequality on the happiness of respondents, irrespective of their position in that income distribution. Actual income distribution in the country was measured by the Gini coefficient.…”

Section: Perceived or Actual Inequality?mentioning

confidence: 99%