Objective and subjectively experienced financial inequalities in income and wealth and their consequences

社会不平等是当前社会和政治讨论的一个主要主题。特别是金融不平等-贫富之间的差距-引起了研究和公共辩论的实质性兴趣。许多研究将金融不平等与各种社会问题和负面后果联系起来。本研究的主要方法是研究金融不平等的客观衡量标准（如基尼指数）与各国或各地区结果之间的相关性。尽管有大量的研究理论，更不用说关于潜在介质的实际数据是罕见的。与此相关的是，目前尚不清楚与各个社会的负面结果相关的客观不平等程度是如何单独体现的。毕竟，从社会心理学和社会学的角度来看，影响个人的通常不是客观情况，而是客观情况如何被主观地表现出来。拟议的研究旨在填补这一空白，调查a）是否以及如何不平等的主观表现与以前的研究中提出的各种中介（如信任，地位竞争，感知公平），B）的因果关系的作用，以及客观水平的不平等。除了测量各自的概念，我们将超越相关性研究和实验操纵个人的不平等的主观表征。此外，我们计划通过实验改变经济博弈中的客观金融不平等，以评估其对假设中介的因果影响。所有研究都允许将各种个体差异测量作为潜在的调节剂。最后，我们计划将德国的一项大规模调查--劳动力市场和社会保障小组研究（PASS）--与工资和就业历史的丰富行政数据联系起来，并使用纵向方法分析企业层面的客观和主观不平等以及潜在中介对生活满意度和健康的影响。

Social inequality is a major theme in the current societal and political discourse. In particular financial inequality – the gap between the rich and the poor – has drawn substantive interest in research and public debates alike. A host of research linked financial inequality to various social problems and negative outcomes. The dominant methodological approach in this research is to look at correlations between an objective measure of financial inequality, such as the Gini index, and outcomes across countries or regions. Despite abundant research theorizing and let alone actual data about the underlying mediators are rare. Relatedly it is unclear how objective levels of inequality that correlate with negative outcomes across societies are represented individually. After all, both from a social psychological and a sociological perspective it is usually not the objective situation that influences individuals but how the objective situation is subjectively represented. The proposed research aims to fill this gap by investigating a) whether and how subjective representations of inequality relate to the various mediators proposed in previous research (e.g. trust, status competition, perceived fairness), b) the causal role of subjective as well as objective levels of inequality. In addition to measuring the respective concepts we will go beyond correlational studies and experimentally manipulate individuals’ subjective representations of inequality. Moreover, we plan to experimentally vary objective financial inequality in economic games in order to assess its causal impact on assumed mediators. All studies allow to include various individual difference measures as potential moderators. Finally, we plan to link a large-scale survey for Germany – the Panel Study Labour Market and Social Security (PASS) – with rich administrative data on wages and employment histories and analyze the effects of objective and subjective inequality at the firm level as well as potential mediators on life satisfaction and health using longitudinal methods.