A System-Focused Investigation of People’s Attitudes Towards Social Inequality and Policy

As social inequality not only persists but increases-71% of the world population live in countries where inequality has grown-redressing it remains a top global policy objective. Because macro-level structures (e.g., the government, the economic system, society at large) play an integral role in perpetuating existing inequalities, it is important to bring them to the forefront of theorizing about how people think about and respond to inequality. Here, I present two lines of research that center people's perceptions of systems as a factor in predicting people's attitudes towards inequality and policy. The first investigates a framework for thinking of examples of inequality that can impact how people view the current system, and in turn, motivate action to reduce inequality. We find that people perceive examples of inequality in terms of prescriptions (disparities in what everyone should have) and proscriptions (disparities in what no one should have) based on whether the examples are seen as good or bad for society, respectively. Exposure to proscriptive (vs. prescriptive) privileges elicits more negative perceptions of the system, which in turn, predicts acceptability of various actions meant to reduce inequality. The second categorizes policies based on how they impact intergroup inequality and investigates whether wanting a more hierarchical and unequal society can predict people's preference for policies that amplify intergroup inequality, beyond opposing policies that decrease inequality. We find that social dominance orientation and system justification predict choosing policies that increase (vs. maintain) inequalities, particularly when the policies harm already marginalized groups vs. help already advantaged groups. Together, these findings show that people's perceptions of macro-level structures are a crucial factor in explaining people's attitudes towards social inequality and policy.