Cognitive factors in inequality perception

经济不平等对社会和个人有许多不利影响。然而，越来越多的证据表明，这些影响中的很大一部分并不是由客观不平等直接造成的，而是由对不平等的主观看法驱动的。如果主观上对不平等的看法如此重要，那么理解这种看法是如何形成的就至关重要了。有证据表明，人们对经济不平等的主观看法往往与现实大相径庭。至关重要的是，在早期的研究中观察到了高估和低估两种情况。这种偏见可能会引起有问题的心理反应。例如，高估不平等可能会导致不满意的程度，这是社会的客观状态所不能保证的。低估不平等可能会导致人们接受社会状况，如果这些状况被正确理解，就会引发抗议。到目前为止，人们对导致这些偏见的心理机制和情景调节因素知之甚少。为了克服这一不足，本项目将研究人们对经济不平等感知的心理过程以及感知偏差的动机后果。该项目将重点研究人们对收入分配的感知通常低估了这种分配的倾斜的现象。在大多数社会，收入分配是右倾的(即低收入的人比高收入的人多)。低估这种偏差会导致人们在不平等认知中出现特有的偏见。例如，有证据表明，这会高估高收入四分位数人群的收入。为什么人们会误解歪曲呢？第一组实验以初步证据和实验实验室范式为基础，测试与学习、记忆和启发式思维相关的三种不同潜在心理机制的运作。结果将有助于更好地理解、预测，甚至可能改变对经济不平等的误解。第二个实验重点是对经济不平等的偏见带来的动机后果。我们将测试以下假设：对收入分配偏差的误解将如何决定(A)对自己在收入分配中的地位以及改变状况的意图的满意度，(B)对自己收入相对于表现的(不)公平的看法，以及(C)在经济上升的情况下，一个人的收入愿望。我们还测试了社会政治态度如何影响人们对收入不平等的看法。最后，我们将通过两项研究中的总体样本来检验精选实验室结果的普遍性。该项目有助于进一步发展RU2847的不平等循环框架，扩大关于客观不平等如何转化为对不平等的主观表述的知识，这是所有进一步处理步骤的基础。

Economic inequality has many detrimental effects for societies and individuals. There is, however, growing evidence that a substantial part of these effects is not directly caused by objective inequality, but rather driven by subjective perceptions of inequality. If subjective perceptions of inequality are so consequential, it is crucial to understand how such perceptions are formed. Evidence suggests that subjective perceptions of economic inequality often significantly diverge from reality. Crucially, both over- and underestimation has been observed in earlier studies. Such biases may cause problematic psychological reactions. For example, overestimating inequality might cause dissatisfaction to a degree that is not warranted by the objective state of society. Underestimating inequality might cause acceptance of societal conditions that, if they were perceived correctly, would cause protest. As of today, the psychological mechanisms and situational moderators that cause these biases are poorly understood. To overcome this shortage, the present project will study psychological processes underlying the perception of economic inequality as well as motivational consequences of perceptual biases.The project will focus on the phenomenon that people's perceptions of income distributions typically underestimate the skew of such distributions. In most societies, income distributions are right-skewed (i.e., more people with low than with high incomes). Underestimating the skew results in characteristic biases in inequality perception. For example, evidence suggests that this causes overestimation of the income of people belonging to upper income quartiles. Why do people misperceive skew? The first set of experiments, based on preliminary evidence and an experimental laboratory paradigm, tests the operation of three different potentially underlying psychological mechanisms related to learning, memory, and heuristic thinking. Results will help to better understand, predict, and perhaps change misperceptions of economic inequality. The second line of experiments focuses on the motivational consequences of biased perceptions of economic inequality. We will test hypotheses about how misperceiving the skew of income distributions will determine (a) satisfaction with one's own position in an income distribution as well as intentions to change one's situation, (b) perceptions of (un-)fairness of one's own income relative to one's performance, and (c) one's income aspirations in the case of economic ascent. We also test how socio-political attitudes affect perceptions of income inequality. We will finally test the generality of select laboratory findings by drawing on general population samples in two studies. The project contributes to further developing the Inequality Cycle Framework of RU 2847 by expanding knowledge about how objective inequality translates into subjective representations of inequality, which are the basis for all further processing steps.