Equality is something generally regarded as a positive thing. Indeed, Pew research shows that most of us do broadly want a more equal society. Yet when it comes to introducing policies to achieve that, however, people become much less keen, especially among the majority white groups.
Research from BerkeleyHaas suggests that this is perhaps not surprising, as people in advantaged groups can often view the very notion of equality as harmful as inequality benefits them (they think).
“We found that people think of the world in zero-sum terms, so that a gain for one group must necessarily be a loss for another,” the researchers explain. “This seems to be a cognitive mistake that everyone is susceptible to, not just a vociferous minority that has antipathy toward any certain group.”
Resistance to equality
The paper goes some way toward explaining why opposition to policies designed to reduce inequality can exist even in those with broadly egalitarian views as people can fear that someone else gaining means them losing out.
“In our experiment, it was more important to people how well off they were relative to other groups than how they were doing in absolute terms,” the researchers explain. “They view a loss in relative advantage as an absolute loss, even when it’s a clear material gain.”
The researchers explain that inequality discussions are often framed in a zero-sum way, which can influence our perception of them. They tried to introduce policies in a non-zero-sum way so that disadvantaged groups are helped without advantaged groups aren’t diminished.
Reducing resistance
During the studies, the researchers controlled for five well-established forms of ideological opposition to equality: political conservatism, preference for hierarchical social structures, belief that society is zero-sum, system-justifying beliefs, and explicit prejudice.
While some of these were correlated with the perceptions people had of policies, the variations in ideology weren’t enough to fully explain people’s negative attitude towards greater equality. Interestingly, even when the researchers blatantly spelled out that support for one group did not take anything from the dominant group, it was insufficient to shift attitudes.
“The causes and solutions to inequality are complex, but even when we simplified it and bent over backwards to make sure everyone is better off in these scenarios, people still found a way to believe they’ll be harmed,” the researchers explain.
Indeed, the only thing that really seemed to move perceptions was when the policy proposal enhanced equality within a group as well as between groups. For instance, if the policy helped to reduce pay disparities between men rather than between men and women.
This hypothesis was then supported when surveying people about California’s Proposition 16, which would have overturned the state’s ban on considering race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin in public employment, education, and contracting.
This commonly provoked fears that it would reduce access to jobs and education among dominant white and Asian participants, and the stronger they held this belief, the less supportive they were of the proposition.
Social identity
Social identity is at the heart of the findings, as people appear to prefer a greater amount of resources to come to their own in-group than to any perceived out-group. This belief is based on a fundamental misperception that reductions in their relative advantage harm them in absolute terms.
With inequality producing enormous social and economic costs to society, the findings are especially troubling. For instance, it has been estimated that racial inequality alone costs around $16 trillion in lost GDP, with the gender pay gap reducing the global economy by up to $160 trillion. The researchers believe that people fundamentally underestimate just how big the impact is of disparities, but the zero-sum perception of equality prevents them from making meaningful progress.
“Our research suggests that you can’t expect everyone to be on board and you should always expect there’s going to be a backlash,” the authors conclude. “The change itself has to be the justification.”
