Fair Shares and Selective Attention

Attitudes towards fairness and redistribution differ along socio-economic lines, resulting in political conflict. To understand the formation of such views find levers to affect them, we study role attention. In a large online experiment, investigate how subjects allocate their visual attention contributions merit luck generation surplus they decide on its division. We that who randomly obtained an advantaged position pay less information about true retain more surplus. Both attentional behavioral patterns persist, although with smaller effect sizes, when dictators subsequently divide money between pairs disadvantaged benevolent judge. Moreover, has substantial causal effect: forcing look for one second at relative overall outcomes reduces having allocations by 25%. These findings open new window cleavages attitudes redistribution, suggest attention-based policy interventions may be effective reducing polarized inequality.