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话语中的一个主要主题。特别是财政不平等——贫富差距——已经引起了研究和公共辩论的实质性兴趣。大量研究将金融不平等与各种社会问题和负面结果联系起来。在这项研究中，主要的方法方法是研究基尼指数（Gini index）等衡量金融不平等的客观指标与国家或地区之间的相关性。尽管有大量的理论研究，更不用说关于潜在中介的实际数据，但很少。与此相关的是，与整个社会的负面结果相关的客观不平等水平是如何单独表现出来的，这一点尚不清楚。毕竟，从社会心理学和社会学的角度来看，通常不是客观情况影响个人，而是客观情况如何被主观地表现出来。本研究旨在通过调查a)不平等的主观表征是否以及如何与先前研究中提出的各种中介相关（例如信任、地位竞争、感知公平），b)主观和客观不平等水平的因果作用来填补这一空白。除了测量各自的概念外，我们还将超越相关研究，并通过实验操纵个人对不平等的主观表征。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。所有的研究都允许包括各种个体差异测量作为潜在的调节因素。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公司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.