Perceptions of unfairness in allocations between multiple recipients

Good Samaritans in Networks: An Experiment on How Networks Influence Egalitarian Sharing and the Evolution of Inequality

The fact that the more resourceful people are sharing with the poor to mitigate inequality—egalitarian sharing—is well documented in the behavioral science research. How inequality evolves as a result of egalitarian sharing is determined by the structure of “who gives whom”. While most prior experimental research investigates allocation of resources in dyads and groups, the paper extends the research of egalitarian sharing to networks for a more generalized structure of social interaction. An agent-based model is proposed to predict how actors, linked in networks, share their incomes with neighbors. A laboratory experiment with human subjects further shows that income distributions evolve to different states in different network topologies. Inequality is significantly reduced in networks where the very rich and the very poor are connected so that income discrepancy is salient enough to motivate the rich to share their incomes with the poor. The study suggests that social networks make a difference in how egalitarian sharing influences the evolution of inequality.

Too sick, not sick enough? Effects of treatment type and timing on depression stigma

A case vignette survey design was used to explore effects of treatment timing (early, delayed, or untreated) and depression treatment type (pharmacological or psychological) on components of depression stigma. The survey was distributed to two samples, 116 undergraduates (UGs) and 301 participants from the online service Amazon Mechanical Turk. As expected, extended untreated depression was associated with greater social distance and negative character evaluation than treated depression, and early treatment was associated with higher illness invalidity stigma (both samples) and illness responsibility stigma (UG sample only). Interaction effects suggested that pharmacotherapy, in comparison with psychotherapy, was more sensitive to the effects of treatment timing on stigma. Taken together, the pattern of results suggests that separate facets of stigma are associated with early depression treatment and prolonged untreated depression. Evidence for separate stigmatization of early treatment and extended illness holds important implications for antistigma campaigns.

Poverty Prefers Company

In three web-based experiments, we show that both actual poverty and experimentally induced (imagined) poverty create a preference for greater inequality. Study 1, a cross-national comparison between Americans and Swedes, showed that respondents who were actually poor and those who were experimentally induced to imagine that they were poor tended to express a heightened preference for greater inequality, and for a higher proportion of poor citizens. Study 2 replicated the effects using different procedures. Study 3 showed that imagining oneself being poor increases preferences for a greater proportion of poor people, but imagining oneself being rich does not increase preferences for a greater proportion of rich people. This poverty prefers company effect might affect support for policies aiming at reducing the number of poor people.

What do Americans know about inequality? It depends on how you ask them

A recent survey of inequality (Norton and Ariely, Perspectives on Psychological Science, 6, 9–12) asked respondents to indicate what percent of the nation’s total wealth is—and should be—controlled by richer and poorer quintiles of the U.S. population. We show that such measures lead to powerful anchoring effects that account for the otherwise remarkable findings that respondents reported perceiving, and desiring, extremely low inequality in wealth. We show that the same anchoring effects occur in other domains, namely web page popularity and school teacher salaries. We introduce logically equivalent questions about average levels of inequality that lead to more accurate responses. Finally, when we made respondents aware of the logical connection between the two measures, the majority said that typical responses to the average measures, indicating higher levels of inequality, better reflected their actual perceptions and preferences than did typical responses to percent measures.