Despite recent empirical evidence on the importance of perceived inequality, its analysis is still underexplored. In this paper we study whether unobserved perceptions of inequality are reflected in observed individual opinions in a consistent fashion. Inconsistency is relevant to ealuate the level of agreement that individuals share with respect to different domains of inequality.

Using the wave from the 2009 International Social Survey Program in the US, we show that inequality is a complicated concept prone to inconsistencies and propose a testing procedure to an empirical appraisal. We find that inconsistencies exist though they may not extend to all the domains of inequality. This inconsistency also emerges by analyzing the relation between unobserved perceptions and political treatment suggesting the hypothesis that inconsistency may be associated with a set of relevant political preferences.

尽管最近有经验证据证明了不平等的重要性，但其分析仍未得到充分研究。在本文中，我们研究了观察到的个人意见是否以一致的方式反映了未观察到的不平等观念。不一致对于降低个人就不平等的不同领域所达成的共识水平很重要。

利用美国2009年国际社会调查计划的热潮，我们证明了不平等是一个容易产生矛盾的复杂概念，并提出了用于实证评估的测试程序。我们发现存在矛盾，尽管它们可能不会扩展到所有不平等领域。通过分析未观察到的看法与政治待遇之间的关系，也出现了这种矛盾，这表明了这种矛盾可能与一系列相关的政治偏好相关的假设。