If you rise, I fall: Equality is prevented by the misperception that it harms advantaged groups

Abstract

Nine preregistered studies ( n = 4197) demonstrate that advantaged group members misperceive equality as necessarily harming their access to resources and inequality as necessarily benefitting them. Only when equality is increased within their ingroup, instead of between groups, do advantaged group members accurately perceive it as unharmful. Misperceptions persist when equality-enhancing policies offer broad benefits to society or when resources, and resource access, are unlimited. A longitudinal survey of the 2020 U.S. voters reveals that harm perceptions predict voting against actual equality-enhancing policies, more so than voters’ political and egalitarian beliefs. Finally two novel-groups experiments experiments reveal that advantaged participants’ harm misperceptions predict voting for inequality-enhancing policies that financially hurt them and against equality-enhancing policies that financially benefit them. Misperceptions persist even after an intervention to improve decision-making. This misperception that equality is necessarily zero-sum may explain why inequality prevails even as it incurs societal costs that harm everyone.

We built this culture (so we can change it): Seven principles for intentional culture change.

“…Intentional culture change may also have unintended consequences or be met with backlash (e.g., Brown et al, 2022;Dobbin & Kalev, 2022;D. S. Wilson, 2016).…”

“…T. Fiske, 2011; Jost et al, 2017; Osborne et al, 2019; Pratto et al, 2013; Ridgeway & Markus, 2022; Zárate et al, 2019). This threat can spur resistance, backlash, or even revolt among those who stand to lose their status, fueling the perception that culture change is a zero-sum game (Brown et al, 2022). For instance, increasing women’s representation in male-dominated fields (e.g., in science, technology, engineering, and math) can be resisted by men in those settings because of the belief that gains for women will necessarily come at a cost to men, worries that gender diversity will lead to a professional identity crisis, and concerns that pro-diversity initiatives are unfair to White men (Danbold & Huo, 2017; Dover et al, 2015; Wilkins et al, 2015).…”

A socioecological approach to explaining how economic inequality and psychological tendencies mutually constitute each other.

“…Thus, they will protect their privilege, not only because they fear downward mobility, but also because a new group of people is ECONOMIC INEQUALITY AS A DYNAMIC SYSTEM 12 perceived to threaten the value and integrity of their standing. As a result, they may oppose redistribution of resources, as they entertain less structural explanations for economic inequality (Edmiston, 2018), and they oppose equality-enhancing policies (Brown et al, 2022). Crucially, individuals with high income have the resources to do so using institutions and networks of privilege.…”

The dynamic socioecological model of economic inequality and psychological tendencies: A cycle of mutual constitution

“…Their adaptive response is to keep people in their place, perhaps because they think that they themselves had to work hard to move up the ladder (Koo et al., 2023). As a result, they entertain less structural explanations for economic inequality (Edmiston, 2018), they oppose equality‐enhancing policies, and they oppose redistribution of resources (Brown et al., 2022). Crucially, individuals with higher income have the resources to do so using their access to institutions and networks of privilege.…”