Heuristics and Biases in Evaluations of Economic Inequality

How money ought to be distributed among different groups is a critical question influencing elections and policymaking. In eight pre-registered studies (N=4,188) we show that people across the political spectrum are systematically biased when making judgments about economic inequality. We hypothesize that people reduce the complexity associated with such judgments by relying on a simplifying strategy in which they mainly focus on differences in wealth between the most salient groups, usually the richest versus poorest groups. This implies two biases. First, judgments about economic distributions are under-sensitive to differences in the size of identified population groups. This results in greater tolerance for inequality and lower support for redistributional policies when richer groups are composed of fewer individuals than poorer groups (e.g., comparing the richest 10% versus the rest of the country). Second, judgments systematically underweight information about intermediate groups relative to the richest and poorest groups, resulting in relative neglect of the prosperity of the middle class, independent of stated concern for their well-being. We show that these biases influence downstream policy support as strongly as differences in partisanship, and we conclude by proposing guidelines for presenting economic distributions in ways that are less susceptible to these biases.