The Psychological Roots of Inequality
The world is in the midst of unprecedented levels of economic inequality; global corporate profits are concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer individuals; poverty, eviction, and food insecurity remain persistent problems facing even the wealthiest nations. It is within this global context that the psychological study of economic inequality enters. My overarching research goal is to understand the basic psychological processes—the motivational states, patterns of social perception, and relational strategies—that both arise from these economic conditions and explain their impact on our behavior. How we come to experience inequality psychologically is the central aim of my current, past, and future research.
Cognitive, Motivational, and Behavioral Responses to Inequality
One observation that social scientists often make in the context of examining rising economic inequality is that efforts to reduce inequality are often met with pushback or indifference, and this can happen for both people at the low and high end of the economic distribution depending on the context. One of my streams of research leverages past work on motivated social cognition to understand why, instead of acting, people may be motivated to do nothing, rather than intervene in the service of greater equity and justice.
Much of my past research has surrounded an interest in how people could seem detached from the economic inequality around them—how could individuals live in comfortable wealth right down the street from people at or near poverty? We developed a theory for why people tend to endorse beliefs and engage in behaviors that facilitate the justification of societal inequality (Kraus et al., 2012, PR). Specifically, people higher vs. lower in socioeconomic standing (SES) tend to inhabit social environments that allow for heightened personal agency and that agency colors perceptions of the causes of the economic inequality around them. This is why people higher in SES tend to explain inequality more in terms of individual character traits (e.g., ability, talent) or genetic factors while simultaneously de-emphasizing structural forces like educational opportunities, inheritance, or discrimination (Kraus, Piff, & Keltner, 2009, JPSP; Kraus & Keltner, 2013, JPSP).
Together with some of my past work on the emotional distancing that co-occurs with elevated SES (Kraus et al., 2010, PS; Stellar, Manzo, Kraus, & Keltner, 2012, Emotion; Piff, Kraus et al., 2010, JPSP), these studies suggest that people minimize and detach from inequality in ways that create barriers to equity-enhancing policy support. That is, people high in SES bring explanations to mind that minimize the impact of structural policy change, and then detach from the impacts of that inequality in their emotion experiences. This response, we reason, could be an adaptive strategy for reducing personal discomfort in the face of rising inequality. In future research, we are examining how detachment in scientific inquiry surrounding societal inequalities creates unique emotional challenges for scholars from historically underrepresented groups, who perceive academia and its methods as dispassionate about societal problems.
My more recent research has expanded on this past work to examine racial economic inequality. In America, collective progress toward racial justice is a popular narrative because it supports our belief that society is fair, and past racial injustice is being rapidly remedied. Unfortunately, when compared with actual data on Black-White disparities in wealth, income, and employer provided healthcare, Americans—and in particular, high income White Americans—report 20% to 25% more equity in economic outcomes than exists (Kraus, Rucker, & Richeson, 2017, PNAS). In the domain of wealth those misperceptions are particularly large as a nationally representative sample of Americans overestimated wealth equality between Black and White Americans by 40% in 1963 and 80% in 2016 (Kraus et al., 2019, PPS).
I have many emerging streams of research examining how people estimate racial inequality. In the domain of measurement, I examine 10 variations of racial inequality perceptions and I explore how these variants lead to more or less overestimation of racial inequality. In the domain of attitude change, we just had a paper accepted for publication at PNAS that uses longitudinal data to examine the ingredients of political messaging that could get people to realistically perceive the magnitude of racial inequality in society. In that work, communicating with data on racial inequality in terms of societal structures (e.g., law and policy) tends to elicit the greatest shift in accuracy and a more nuanced and structural understanding of race and racism in society.
Visible Signs of Everyday Inequality
When people discuss economic inequality in society the discussion typically revolves around global or national trends. What is lost in these discussions is how that inequality is experienced in the everyday lives of individuals. One might assume that, since money and occupation titles can be concealed, SES is not something we use as a basis for social perception and group categorization. My research program suggests the opposite, that our economic circumstances infect the spaces we live in and the behaviors we engage in to such an extent that even brief social exchanges accurately communicate one’s income, education, and occupation status (Kraus, Park, & Tan, 2017, PPS). My initial work on this phenomenon found that 60s get-acquainted exchanges between undergraduate students in the laboratory held enough information to accurately communicate participant parental education and income (Kraus & Keltner, 2009, PS). In more recent work we have found that pictures posted on Facebook provide enough information to accurately signal SES to strangers (Becker, Kraus, & Rheinschmidt-Same, 2017, JSI).
There are many sources of the SES signal: For instance, we found that assigning targets to wear a business suit, versus their own clothing, elicited more deferential behavior among perceivers, along with lower ratings of perceiver social status (Kraus & Mendes, 2014, JEP:G). Of late, my research has turned to vocal signs of SES. We expected speech to communicate SES because it is a form of behavior that is both difficult to control and directly tied to our educational and cultural experiences (e.g., travel and language learning). To test whether brief speech signals SES we used a series of experiments to examine if the way people speak communicates SES even when what people say is held constant or accounted for. We found that speech signs of SES are of similar magnitude to speech signs of race and age, and importantly, that these speech signs of SES had direct consequences during hiring decisions—lower vs. higher SES job applicants were seen both as less competent and a poorer fit for a job by hiring managers (Kraus, Torrez, Park, & Ghayebi, 2019, PNAS).
Looking Ahead
I have a few ongoing streams of research that will be a part of my plans over the next decade of my work with graduate students and other faculty. In the domain of how people think about and explain economic inequality, some of my future work examines how people think about the question “what is enough?” In some of our examinations of economic policy recommendations people often consider the cost of living in terms of goods and services but there is little consideration of the some of the psychological costs of not having enough. For instance, if people have enough money to cover basic expenses as modeled by an economist, do they really have enough to live lives that are psychologically rich and meaningful? Some of the next chapter of our work involves exploring the distance between cost of living estimates and people’s estimates of what enough money would look like. Our current work explores how much these estimates of what is enough enhance people’s support for equity-enhancing policies like heightened minimum wage standards.
A second stream of research involves people’s narrative trajectories. In social psychology research much of our expectations about those people from working class backgrounds are based on the belief in the group’s relative lack of competence. However, there are dimensions of working-class stereotypes and beliefs that highlight work ethic and striving. In some preliminary work, we’ve been exploring ways to capitalize on these latter associations to improve the perceived fit between first generation college students and academic institutions. In that work, a narrative focus on the trajectories of working-class college applicants, versus on their current academic standing (e.g., GPA and SAT scores), erases the class achievement gap. We’re gearing up over the next decade to test this effect more carefully in ecologically valid contexts in the course of real college admissions.
A third stream of research examines the consequences for diversity, equity, and inclusion work in the context of narratives of racial progress. In short, if we conceive of progress as a natural and automatic unfolding of time, then policies that are more radically focused on equity and justice will be deemed as too risky or unnecessary. In some work that we will be publishing in the next couple of years, we find that adherence to progress narratives predicts a lack of support for evidence based equitable policies, and increased support for more superficial fixes for a lack of diversity and equity.