(2025):
What you see is what you get: The effect of perceived inequality on subjective well-being.
Journal of Happiness Studies,
26,
6, Article no 86,
1-22.
More
Objective and Subjectively Experienced Financial Inequalities in Income and Wealth and Their Consequences
Project Directors
Prof. Dr. Herbert Bless,
Prof. Dr. Michaela Wänke,
Prof. Dr. Tobias Wolbring
Project Staff
Lara Többen
DFG-funded
2020 – 2026
Research question/goal:
Social inequality is a major theme in the current societal and political discourse. In particular financial inequality – the gap between the rich and the poor – has drawn substantive interest in research and public debates alike. A host of research linked financial inequality to various social problems and negative outcomes. The dominant methodological approach in this research is to look at correlations between an objective measure of financial inequality, such as the Gini index, and outcomes across countries or regions. Despite abundant research theorizing and let alone actual data about the underlying mediators are rare. Relatedly it is unclear how objective levels of inequality that correlate with negative outcomes across societies are represented individually. After all, both from a social psychological and a sociological perspective it is usually not the objective situation that influences individuals but how the objective situation is subjectively represented. The proposed research aims to fill this gap by investigating a) whether and how subjective representations of inequality relate to the various mediators proposed in previous research (e.g. trust, status competition, perceived fairness), b) the causal role of subjective as well as objective levels of inequality. In addition to measuring the respective concepts we will go beyond correlational studies and experimentally manipulate individuals’ subjective representations of inequality. Moreover, we plan to experimentally vary objective financial inequality in economic games in order to assess its causal impact on assumed mediators. Finally, we plan to link a large-scale survey for Germany with data on wages and employment histories and analyze the effects of objective and subjective inequality at the firm level as well as potential mediators on life satisfaction and health using longitudinal methods.
Current stage:
In a series of four studies, we have demonstrated that individuals’ belief in a just world influences how they perceive the distribution of financial inequality. The results of our experimental studies and the analyses of survey data (including cross-country comparisons) indicate that individuals with a strong just world belief tend to perceive the distributions of income and wealth as more equal. Our experimental study thus supports the assumption of the causal influence of just world beliefs.
Publications
Journal Articles
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(2023): The crucial role of linearity when comparing effects across studies. Nature Reviews Psychology, 2, 9, 516–517. More
Presentations
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(2022): Effect of Social Class on Perceived Control. [52nd Congress of the German Psychological Society (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Psychologie, DGPs) , Hildesheim, 09/09/2022 - 14/09/2022]. More
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(2022): Unequal effects of inequality: Political orientation moderates the effect of inequality on subjective well-being. [24 hours of Political Psychology. Interdisciplinary Conference of the German Political Psychology Network, (virtual conference), 09/03/2022 - 10/03/2022]. More
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(2021): In the eye of the beholder: Subjective perceptions of inequality determine its consequences. [ESCON 2021, (virtual conference), 12/09/2021 - 14/09/2021]. More
Thesis
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(2023): Subjective Perceptions of Income Inequality: Associated Processes and Effects on Subjective Well-Being. Mannheim, University of Mannheim. More