According to data from the Congressional Budget Office, wealth inequality has been rising steeply in the United States over the last 30 years. This gap between rich and poor means that the top 1% of earners now own nearly 30% of the total wealth in the country, with the bottom 50% owning only 4% of that wealth.
That disparity isn’t good for our well-being—and not just for economic reasons. Income inequality also makes people unhappier, overall, because living in an unfair society means losing trust in others and affects social harmony. Even for the 1%, economic inequality has its downsides, including more difficulty connecting with other people in warm, compassionate ways. That could lead to strained (or absent) relationships—a proven path to poorer well-being.
Wealth inequality has been tied to less cooperative behavior, too. In one experiment, for example, people played an economics game in which everyone’s fortunes rose if a player cooperated, while not cooperating meant you enriched yourself at others’ expense. When people were randomly assigned to have similar incomes or much higher incomes than other players, those in the more inequitable scenarios were less cooperative; specifically, richer players tended to take advantage of poorer players.
“When you have visible inequality, you get an exploitation scenario, where the rich take advantage of the poor,” says Nicholas Christakis, one of the study’s authors. “Visibility of inequality erodes cooperation, wealth accumulation, and friendliness.”
Wealth inequity has also been tied to lower voting rates, which means individuals have less say in the political process in places where there is greater disparity between rich and poor. All that, along with many other social, economic, and psychological downsides, suggests none of us benefit from wealth inequality.
So, if we know about all of these downsides, why are we stuck in this pattern? Why do we continue to oppose solutions to economic inequality, like increasing minimum wage or taxing the rich more heavily or providing a basic income, all of which could help bring this gap down and improve people’s lives? Research suggests that part of it is due to psychological biases that many of us carry, often without realizing it.
How biases get in the way
Racial and sexist biases are obvious factors when looking at inequity in our society, and many of us carry these biases in unconscious ways. Black people and women in the U.S., in general, have less accumulated wealth, and past discrimination plays a significant role in creating that disparity.
Another bias indirectly supporting inequity is “zero-sum thinking,” the belief that one’s success must come at the expense of someone else’s loss (i.e., “there’s only so much pie to go around”). While this is true in some situations—think sports competitions—it’s not necessarily true when it comes to our economy. For example, having more women and Black people represented in the workforce has been a boon to the economy, which benefits us all. Still, many people hold on to zero-sum thinking, a view exacerbated by income inequality, which can make them less willing to champion a fairer society for all.
Confirmation bias, the tendency to see evidence for what we already believe, exacerbates that problem. Sometimes considered the most problematic cognitive bias, it keeps us clinging to past experience and reduces our ability to change our minds in the face of new evidence.
Here’s how that might work: Let’s say you’ve read an article about a “welfare cheater” and concluded that poor people are dishonest and don’t deserve help. This may keep you glued to similar stories (particularly in the age of algorithms) that feed us more of what we already believe, while ignoring the larger picture of the many hard-working people in this country just trying to get by. That skewed view is likely to decrease your support for poverty relief programs.
Another bias that can affect our willingness to address disparities is the correspondence bias (or fundamental attribution error), where we tend to blame personality traits rather than outside influences for someone’s poor behavior or situation (and the opposite when considering our own behavior). In the above scenario, labeling poor people as lazy and ignoring the structural forces that keep them down is an example of this bias in action.
Other cognitive biases described in economist Robert Frank’s book, Success and Luck, include the halo effect, in which someone might ascribe positive qualities to successful people that aren’t relevant to their success, and the hindsight bias, where, after an event has occurred, we tend to believe it was predictable (even though there’s no evidence for that). This can lead us to believe someone who’s successful is deserving or that their success was inevitable, lessening support for solutions to inequality.
“If being born in a good environment is one of the luckiest things that can happen to anyone, it is failure to appreciate luck’s importance that has done the most to undermine our collective stock of good fortune,” writes Frank in his book.
This might seem counterintuitive to us, given that many of believe we live in a meritocracy, where everyone has equal opportunity. But believing in a meritocratic society has, unfortunately, been tied to more wealth inequality. This is because it blinds us to how a person’s ability to perform well could be tied to “tailwinds” they’ve enjoyed, like coming from a family wealthy enough to afford private tutoring, enrichment activities (like piano lessons), or unpaid internships. If we don’t see how unfair advantages taint a meritocracy, we might not feel the need to correct it.
“Meritocracy can be an appealing ideology,” says Daniela Goya-Tocchetto, a researcher who studied this phenomenon. “Once something becomes the status quo and gives us a simple answer—and we don’t have something simple to replace it—we just get stuck on that.”
Findings from a recent study suggest another bias: “is-ought” thinking, which basically means believing that how things are now (i.e., a large income disparity) is how they should be (i.e., income disparity is justifiable and doesn’t need changing). By looking at real-life protests against economic injustice within different U.S. counties, the researchers found that people in counties with greater wealth disparity protested less than those with less wealth disparity. Several experiments within the same study also showed that when people believed a (fictitious) country had higher income inequality, they showed reduced support for increasing the minimum wage in that country.
Though not necessarily biases, per se, there are other factors here that erode efforts to reduce inequality. Research finds that valuing individualism (a belief in the importance of self-reliance, a deep American value) versus collectivism (a belief in the importance of assuring the well-being of all) leads to less support for welfare programs. Additionally, many Americans believe that the government is already doing a lot to reduce income inequality, which undermines their desire to alleviate it.
All of these mindsets and biases can be hard to change. But there is still hope in the fight to reduce economic inequality.
How to gather more support for economic equality
For reducing racial and gender bias in yourself, Dolly Chugh’s 2018 book The Person You Mean to Be offers many ideas for countering bias and nudging yourself in the right direction. She also gives advice to workplaces around how to reduce headwinds for those who’ve traditionally been given less opportunity, by, for example, making sure diverse voices are heard in staff meetings. While these represent only a few ideas in the vast literature on this topic, they may be useful for decreasing opportunity disparities at work and, by extension, helping reduce economic inequality.
In the meritocracy experiment mentioned above, the researchers found that expanding one’s view of people was helpful in reducing belief in a meritocracy. When people in the study were given information about the headwinds or tailwinds faced by candidates for college admissions or job promotions, they were less likely to support meritocracy and only consider “objective” performance in decision making—and more likely to support equity in promotions and admissions. This was true whether the participants were politically conservative or not, suggesting that helping people question the benefits of living in a meritocracy could increase public support for measures that help reduce unfair economic inequity, too.
“Meritocracy can make a lot of sense when we look at a snapshot of reality, but as soon as you expand the lens through which you’re looking at the world, the merit process becomes so biased,” says Goya-Tocchetto. “Once we talk about and acknowledge that, maybe we can shape people’s views about what ‘equal opportunity’ really means.”
In his book, Frank suggests practicing gratitude, which can reduce your self-focus and increase your connection to others. As one of his graduate students showed (in an unpublished study), people who focused on how external forces were responsible for the many gifts in their lives, as opposed to focusing on how their own attributes led to these blessings, were more apt to be generous toward others in need, which could in turn motivate people to fight inequality.
Likewise, in the study on “is-ought” thinking, researchers found that helping people expand their view of what’s possible increased their support for minimum wage increases. By giving people a chance to think through what wealth inequality was reasonable in an ideal society (instead of just rehashing the current reality), it became clearer that there were options for change they could support. In our everyday lives, we might find similar inspiration by looking for counterexamples in the real world, like other countries who have lowered levels of wealth inequality by enacting their own policies.
In one study on zero-sum thinking, researchers found that telling people they’re not living in a highly competitive place lessened their zero-sum thinking and their prejudice toward outgroups they saw as competition for limited resources (like people of different ethnicities, citizen status, gender, etc.). This suggests that encouraging cooperation over competition and understanding that abundance could be available to all (and not limited to the competitive “winners”) can help people to come together and push for better economic policies rather than accepting the status quo.
In many ways, being aware of the biases we all hold—including the ones mentioned here and others—is the key. For us to truly reduce wealth inequality, and enjoy all of the benefits that would entail, we need to understand how our automatic thinking acts against us. If we can slow down our biased thinking, imagine a better future together, and consider policy changes that would drive inequality down, we could all find ourselves in a more equitable, and happier, society.
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