Neoliberalism asserts that to preserve individual liberty, an effective competitive market must be established to allow individuals to freely choose their economic activities and to reward individuals according to their merits. This ideology has been criticized for condoning social inequality by attributing the presence of social hierarchy to innate or learned personal qualities. We review existing psychological research that has treated neoliberalism as a cluster of personal beliefs and supplement this review with a cross-cultural analysis of 40 societies that differ along two dimensions of neoliberalism: presence of economic freedom and believing in meritocracy. At the individual level, subscription to neoliberalism is positively associated with confidence in personal control, endorsement of system justification, social exclusion of disadvantaged groups, and reluctance to take remedial collective actions that would reduce social inequality. At the society level, the presence of economic freedom and popular support for meritocracy in prototypic neoliberal societies jointly predict greater acceptance of unequal power distribution in these societies, even after controlling for the actual level of economic inequality.

新自由主义主张要维护个人自由，就必须建立有效的竞争市场，以允许个人自由选择经济活动并根据个人的功劳来奖励个人。这种意识形态因将社会等级制度的存在归因于先天或学识的个人品质而被批评为纵容社会不平等。我们回顾了将新自由主义视为一整套个人信念的现有心理学研究，并通过对40个社会的跨文化分析进行了补充，这些分析在新自由主义的两个维度上有所不同：经济自由的存在和信奉精英制。在个人层面，接受新自由主义与对个人控制的信心，对系统合理性的认可，社会排斥弱势群体，并且不愿采取补救性集体行动来减少社会不平等。在社会一级，存在经济自由原型新自由主义社会的精英支持和民众支持共同预测，即使在控制了实际的经济不平等水平之后，这些社会也越来越接受不平等的权力分配。