The Wealth of Nations: International Judgments Regarding Actual and Ideal Societal Resource Distributions

ARSENIO, WILLIAM; BARREIRO, ALICIA; WAINRYB, CECILIA

Boston

Congreso; 29th APS Annual Convention; 2017

Association for Psychological Science

be distributed across different groups. More recently, developmental and social psychologists have begun to ?systematically articulate and empirically text psychological models of justice? (Tyler, 2015, p. 9), with the goal of understanding the moral principles commonly used by adolescents and adults. For example, Norton and Ariely (2011) asked a representative sample of U.S. adults to judge how national wealth is currently distributed (actual judgments) and then ideally how wealth should be distributed (ideal judgments). Participants estimated how much national wealth each of five population quintiles owns and should own, starting with the richest 20% of Americans down to the poorest 20%. Participants judged that, overall, the richest 20% owns about 59% of all national wealth, down to 3% for the poorest 20% of the population. For ideal judgments, participants judged the richest quintile should own 39% vs. 11% for the poorest quintile. Moreover, participants? judgments differed only modestly as a function of their gender, political affiliation, and income. The authors concluded that although Americans underestimate actual wealth inequality (e.g., the top 20% owns 84% vs. the estimated 59%), there was a surprising amount of consensus across groups that the ideally wealth should be much more equitably distributed than what is believed to exist.This poster summarizes data indicating that adolescents and adults from several different countries both underestimate actual levels of national wealth inequality while also preferring much more equitable ideal distributions of wealth. In 4 studies, the judgments of adults from the U.S. (Norton & Ariely, 2011) and Australia (Norton et al.,2014), and adolescents from lower (Arsenio, Preziosi, Silberstein, & Hamburger, 2012) and lower middle class U.S. communities (Arsenio & Willems, in press) revealed an awareness that the richest national quintile is substantially wealthier than the poorest quintile. The ratios of top vs. bottom 20% wealth owned estimates, for example, ranged from 20 to 1 (U.S. adults: 59% attributed to the top quintile vs. 3% to the bottom quintile) to 6-1 (U.S. adolescents). All groups substantially underestimated actual wealth inequality. In addition, adults preferred a less equal ideal wealth distribution than did U.S. adolescents. Subsequent studies conducted in Argentina (Barreiro, Wainryb, & Arsenio, in preparation) and the U.S. (Weinstein, Venkataramanan, & Arsenio, in preparation) reveal that adolescents? and adults? judgments for actual wealth actual distribution vary more by political affiliation and social class than originally suggested by Norton and Ariely (2011). For example, more politically conservative U.S. adults underestimated wealth inequality more than peers, whereas Argentinian adolescents from higher SES communities underestimated inequality less than peers. Surprisingly, however, all groups preferred a more egalitarian ideal distribution of wealth than what they thought to exist.These findings will be depicted graphically in a form that allows for easy comparisons across studies and judgments of actual and ideal wealth distribution. A brief discussion box will highlight commonalities in actual vs. ideal wealth preferences and their implications for future psychological research on societal resource allocation and distributive justice.