Economic inequality in the United States has reached historic highs. Although one may intuit that rising inequality would predict increased support for inequality-reduction strategies, the relationship between economic inequality and attitudes toward redistribution remains unclear. The current research sought to better understand the impacts of economic inequality and socioeconomic rank on attitudes toward redistribution. Importantly, this research uses experimental methods to disentangle the effect of one's socioeconomic rank from the level of inequality in the system. Across three experiments, we found causal evidence suggesting that both economic inequality and socioeconomic rank uniquely influenced overall support for redistributive policies. Moreover, we investigated psychological mechanisms for these effects, finding evidence that beliefs about the fairness of inequality and redistribution mediated the relationship between inequality and support for redistribution, while perceived deservingness and beliefs that inequality is fair mediated the relationship between socioeconomic ranking and support for redistribution.

美国的经济不平等达到了历史新高。尽管人们可能直觉地认为不平等加剧预示着对减少不平等战略的支持会增加，但经济不平等与对再分配的态度之间的关系仍不清楚。当前的研究试图更好地了解经济不平等和社会经济等级对再分配态度的影响。重要的是，这项研究使用实验方法将一个人的社会经济等级的影响与系统中的不平等程度分开。在三个实验中，我们发现因果证据表明经济不平等和社会经济排名都独特地影响了对再分配政策的总体支持。此外，我们调查了这些影响的心理机制，