High Economic Inequality Makes Us Feel Less Wealthy

What Makes Us Feel the Best Also Makes Us Feel the Worst: The Emotional Impact of Independent and Interdependent Experiences

Four studies examined the hypothesis that intense emotional experiences are more often centered on interdependent than independent experiences. Studies 1 and 2 demonstrated that when asked to write about emotionally intense events, participants were more likely to write about interdependent than independent experiences. Study 3 provided evidence that these effects were not due to recall effects...

The mere thought of money makes you feel less pain.

Economic Voting and Economic Inequality: US Presidential Elections

Researchers and pundits alike view the state of the national economy as a key determinant of vote decisions and election outcomes: voters reward or punish the incumbent party as national economic conditions improve or decline. In an era of rising income inequality, however, national conditions provide relatively poor information to voters about how the incumbent is handling the economy in their...

High economic inequality leads higher-income individuals to be less generous.

Research on social class and generosity suggests that higher-income individuals are less generous than poorer individuals. We propose that this pattern emerges only under conditions of high economic inequality, contexts that can foster a sense of entitlement among higher-income individuals that, in turn, reduces their generosity. Analyzing results of a unique nationally representative survey th...

Does less inequality among households mean less inequality among individuals?

Consider an income distribution among households of the same size and suppose that the individuals, equally needy from the point of view of an ethical observer, are treated unfairly within each household. We look for conditions under which welfare and inequality quasi-orders are preserved from the household level at the individual one. A necessary and sufficient condition for the Generalized Lo...