The impact of economic inequality on conspiracy beliefs

Salvador Casara, B. G., Suitner, C., & Jetten, J.

(2022). Journal of Experimental Social 

Psychology, 98, 104245.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2021.104245

Abstract

Previous literature highlights the crucial role of economic inequality in triggering a range of negative societal outcomes. However, the relationship between economic inequality and the proliferation of conspiracy beliefs remains unexplored. Here, we explore the endorsement of conspiracy beliefs as an outcome of objective country-level (Study 1a, 1b, 1c), perceived (Study 2), and manipulated economic inequality (Studies 3a, 3b, 4a, 4b). In the correlational studies, both objective and perceived economic inequality were associated with greater conspiracy beliefs. In the experiments, participants in the high (compared to the low) inequality condition were more likely to endorse conspiratorial narratives. This effect was fully mediated by anomie (Studies 3a, 3b) suggesting that inequality enhances the perception that society is breaking down (anomie), which in turn increases conspiratorial thinking, possibly in an attempt to regain some sense of order and control. Furthermore, the link between economic inequality and conspiracy beliefs was stronger when participants endorsed a conspiracy worldview (Studies 4a, 4b). Moreover, conspiracy beliefs mediated the effect of the economic inequality manipulation on willingness to engage in collective action aimed at addressing economic inequality. The results show that economic inequality and conspiracy beliefs go hand in hand: economic inequality can cause conspiratorial thinking and conspiracy beliefs can motivate collective action against economic inequality.

From the General Discussion

It is also important to consider whether economic inequality triggers the endorsement of general or more specific conspiracy beliefs. Data from Studies 3a and 3b showed that the manipulation of economic inequality affects the endorsement of a wide range of conspiracy beliefs— general conspiracy beliefs as well as conspiracies that relate to the specific fictional society. In Studies 4a and 4b, we found that inequality enhanced the belief in conspiracies perpetrated by different groups in the specific fictional society (i.e., politicians, scientists, multinational companies, and pharmaceutical industries) while it did not affect participants’ conspiracy worldview. Future research should focus on the impact of economic inequality on the endorsement of specific versus more general conspiracy theories. It may well be the case that the relation between economic inequality and conspiracy belief endorsement is stronger when participants consider specific conspiracy beliefs that blame an outgroup for heightened anomie that results from economic inequality. Such conspiracy beliefs best serve the function of mobilizing collective ingroup action that might hold the promise of providing people with a sense of collective agency (or control; see Bukowski et al., 2017).

These results have important implications. First, those who are prone to believe in conspiracy theories are sometimes viewed as driven by irrationality — a vision that is indeed supported by a vast literature about the negative consequences of conspiracy beliefs (e.g., Jolley & Douglas, 2014; Lewandowsky et al., 2013; Van der Linden, 2015). Other findings show that conspiracy beliefs are associated with dispositional constructs that are prodromal of mental disease, such as schizotypy and delusional thinking (Barron et al., 2018; Darwin et al., 2011). However, factors that trigger conspiracy beliefs are not always irrational and they may be driven by anomie-prompted socio-structural perceptions about societies, such as economic inequality. 

The research is here.

Moral Expansiveness Around the World: The Role of Societal Factors Across 36 Countries

Kirkland, K., Crimston, C. R., et al. (2022).

Social Psychological and Personality Science.

https://doi.org/10.1177/19485506221101767

Abstract

What are the things that we think matter morally, and how do societal factors influence this? To date, research has explored several individual-level and historical factors that influence the size of our ‘moral circles.' There has, however, been less attention focused on which societal factors play a role. We present the first multi-national exploration of moral expansiveness—that is, the size of people’s moral circles across countries. We found low generalized trust, greater perceptions of a breakdown in the social fabric of society, and greater perceived economic inequality were associated with smaller moral circles. Generalized trust also helped explain the effects of perceived inequality on lower levels of moral inclusiveness. Other inequality indicators (i.e., Gini coefficients) were, however, unrelated to moral expansiveness. These findings suggest that societal factors, especially those associated with generalized trust, may influence the size of our moral circles.

From the Discussion section

We found a clear link between greater generalized trust and increased moral expansiveness within-countries. Although we cannot be certain of causality, it may be that since trust is the glue that binds relationships, generalized trust may therefore be a necessary ingredient before one can care for strangers and more distant entities. Furthermore, while perceptions of breakdown within leadership (i.e., that government is ineffective and illegitimate) was not predictive of the scope of moral expansiveness, greater perceptions of breakdown in social fabric (e.g., low trust and no shared moral standards) was linked to reduced MES scores. Together this suggests that the relationships between individuals in a society relate to the size of moral circles as opposed to perceptions of those in power.

Low generalized trust was found to mediate the relationship between a higher perceived wealth gap among the rich and the poor and reduced moral expansiveness both within- and between-countries. Prior research has established that high economic inequality is related to reduced generalized trust (Oishi et al., 2011; Uslaner & Brown, 2005; Wilkinson & Pickett, 2007). This is the first work to show it may also be related to how we construct our moral world. However, experimental evidence or support from longitudinal data is needed before we can be certain about directionality. In contrast, perceptions of the breakdown in social fabric did not mediate the relationship between a higher perceived wealth gap among the rich and the poor and reduced moral expansiveness. Although a breakdown in social fabric is characterized by lower generalized trust between citizens, the social fabric concept also encompasses the perception that a shared moral standard among people is lacking (Teymoori et al., 2017). It thus appears to be the specific element of trust, rather than a breakdown in the social fabric more broadly, that mediates the relationship between the perceived wealth gap and moral expansiveness. Although we found a similar mediation effect at both levels of analysis, there was a non-significant tendency for a higher estimate of the wealth gap between countries to be related to greater moral expansiveness.

A pdf is here.

During the Pandemic, the FCC Must Provide Internet for All

Gigi Sohn
Wired.com
Originally published 28 April 20

If anyone believed access to the internet was not essential prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, nobody is saying that today. With ongoing stay-at-home orders in most states, high-speed broadband internet access has become a necessity to learn, work, engage in commerce and culture, keep abreast of news about the virus, and stay connected to neighbors, friends, and family. Yet nearly a third of American households do not have this critical service, either because it is not available to them, or, as is more often the case, they cannot afford it.

Lifeline is a government program that seeks to ensure that all Americans are connected, regardless of income. Started by the Reagan administration and placed into law by Congress in 1996, Lifeline was expanded by the George W. Bush administration and expanded further during the Obama administration. The program provides a $9.25 a month subsidy per household to low-income Americans for phone and/or broadband service. Because the subsidy is so minimal, most Lifeline customers use it for mobile voice and data services.

The Federal Communications Commission sets Lifeline’s policies, including rules about who is eligible to receive the subsidy, its amount, and which companies can provide the service. Americans whose income is below a certain level or who receive government assistance—such as Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, and Supplemental Security Income, or SSI—are eligible.

During this crisis, President Donald Trump’s FCC could make an enormous dent in the digital divide if it expanded Lifeline, even if just on a temporary basis. The FCC could increase the subsidy so that it can be used to pay for robust fixed internet access. It could also make Lifeline available to a broader subset of Americans, specifically the tens of millions who have just filed for unemployment benefits. But that’s unlikely to be a priority for this FCC and its chairman, Ajit Pai, who has spent nearly his entire tenure trying to destroy the program.

The info is here.

Go Fund Yourself

Stephen Marche

Mother Jones

Originally published January/February 2018

Here is an excerpt:

Health care in America is the wedge of inequality: It’s the luxury everyone has to have and millions can’t afford. Sites like YouCaring have stepped in to fill the gap. The total amount in donations generated by crowdfunding sites has increased eleven­fold since the appearance of Obamacare. In 2011, sites like GoFundMe and YouCaring were generating a total of $837 million. Three years later, that number had climbed to $9.5 billion. Under the Trump administration, YouCaring expects donations to jump even higher, and the company has already seen an estimated 25 percent spike since the election, which company representatives believe is partly a response to the administration’s threats to Obamacare.

Crowdfunding companies say they’re using technology to help people helping people, the miracle of interconnectedness leading to globalized compassion. But an emerging consensus is starting to suggest a darker, more fraught reality—sites like YouCaring and GoFundMe may in fact be fueling the inequities of the American health care system, not fighting them. And they are potentially exacerbating racial, economic, and educational divides. “Crowdfunding websites have helped a lot of people,” medical researcher Jeremy Snyder wrote in a 2016 article for the Hastings Center Report, a journal focused on medical ethics. But, echoing other scholars, he warned that they’re “ultimately not a solution to injustices in the health system. Indeed, they may themselves be a cause of injustices.” Crowdfunding is yet another example of tech’s best intentions generating unseen and unfortunate outcomes.

The article is here.

Is There an Ideal Amount of Income Inequality?

Brian Gallagher
Nautilus
Originally published September 28, 2017

Here is an excerpt:

Is extreme inequality a serious problem?

Extreme inequality in the United States, and elsewhere, is deeply troubling on a number of fronts. First, there is the moral issue. For a country explicitly founded on the principles of liberty, equality, and the pursuit of happiness, protected by the “government of the people, by the people, for the people,” extreme inequality raises troubling questions of social justice that get at the very foundations of our society. We seem to have a “government of the 1 percent by the 1 percent for the 1 percent,” as the economics Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz wrote in his Vanity Fair essay. The Harvard philosopher Tim Scanlon argues that extreme inequality is bad for the following reasons: (1) economic inequality can give wealthier people an unacceptable degree of control over the lives of others; (2) economic inequality can undermine the fairness of political institutions; (3) economic inequality undermines the fairness of the economic system itself; and (4) workers, as participants in a scheme of cooperation that produces national income, have a claim to a fair share of what they have helped to produce.

You’re an engineer. How did you get interested in inequality?

I do design, control, optimization, and risk management for a living. I’m used to designing large systems, like chemical plants. I have a pretty good intuition for how systems will operate, how  they can run efficiently, and how they may fail. When I started thinking about the free market and society as systems, I already had an intuitive grasp about their function. Clearly there are differences between a system of inanimate entities, like chemical plants, and human society. But they’re both systems, so there’s a lot of commonalities as well. My experience as a systems engineer helped me as I was groping in the darkness to get my hand around these issues, and to ask the right questions.

The article is here.

Automation on our own terms

Benedict Dellot and Fabian Wallace-Stephens
Medium.com
Originally published September 17, 2017

Here is an excerpt:

There are three main risks of embracing AI and robotics unreservedly:

1. A rise in economic inequality — To the extent that technology deskills jobs, it will put downward pressure on earnings. If jobs are removed altogether as a result of automation, the result will be greater returns for those who make and deploy the technology, as well as the elite workers left behind in firms. The median OECD country has already seen a decrease in its labour share of income of about 5 percentage points since the early 1990s, with capital’s share swallowing the difference. Another risk here is market concentration. If large firms continue to adopt AI and robotics at a faster rate than small firms, they will gain enormous efficiency advantages and as a result could take excessive share of markets. Automation could lead to oligopolistic markets, where a handful of firms dominate at the expense of others.
2. A deepening of geographic disparities — Since the computer revolution of the 1980s, cities that specialise in cognitive work have gained a comparative advantage in job creation. In 2014, 5.5 percent of all UK workers operated in new job types that emerged after 1990, but the figure for workers in London was almost double that at 9.8 percent. The ability of cities to attract skilled workers, as well as the diverse nature of their economies, makes them better placed than rural areas to grasp the opportunities of AI and robotics. The most vulnerable locations will be those that are heavily reliant on a single automatable industry, such as parts of the North East that have a large stock of call centre jobs.
3. An entrenchment of demographic biases — If left untamed, automation could disadvantage some demographic groups. Recall our case study analysis of the retail sector, which suggested that AI and robotics might lead to fewer workers being required in bricks and mortar shops, but more workers being deployed in warehouse operative roles. Given women are more likely to make up the former and men the latter, automation in this case could exacerbate gender pay and job differences. It is also possible that the use of AI in recruitment (e.g. algorithms that screen CVs) could amplify workplace biases and block people from employment based on their age, ethnicity or gender.

The article is here.