Why Income Inequality Is Dissatisfying—Perceptions of Social Status and the Inequality-Satisfaction Link in Europe

High Economic Inequality Makes Us Feel Less Wealthy

“…The current research has the limitation of using the same paradigm in all studies to manipulate economic inequality. However, our results are in line with the research conducted by Schneider (2019) who showed that the degree of economic inequality among European countries negatively predicts subjective SES. Therefore, our result together with Schneider's results provide strong evidence that economic inequality and subjective SES are related.…”

“…Therefore, in contexts with high economic inequality people feel more deprived because the gap between their resources and the resources available to those who are wealthier is larger and this makes them less satisfied with what they have (Osborne et al, 2015). Consistent with this reasoning, Schneider (2019) found that economic inequality predicts more dissatisfaction because it reduces the perceived social status.…”

“…Initial evidence suggest that economic inequality reduces one's perceived relative income and wealthi.e., one's own perceived income and wealth compared to that of others (Osborne, Sibley, & Sengupta, 2015;Payne, Brown-iannuzzi, & Hannay, 2017;Schneider, 2019). However, from this research it is not clear whether inequality makes people focus on their own wealth and income (which they judged as lower the more unequal the context) or whether inequality leads them to focus on how much more other people have compared to them (i.e., the gap with others is greater or smaller as a result of inequality).…”

“…It worth noting that althought the focus of the current research was on the middle class or average income groups, future research should explore the support for our hypotheses for low or high wealth groups. Building on cross-sectional research (Schneider, 2019), we predict that our findings should generalise to other wealth groups. The effect of contextual economic inequality on perceived wealth and SES is important because, in most research, the psychological consequences of SES and of economic inequality are treated independently (Neckerman & Torche, 2007).…”

Inequality and Life Satisfaction in Low- and Middle-Income Countries: The Role of Opportunity

“…The relationship between inequality and SWB may well be based on perceptions of the environment [2,11,[20][21][22], rather than on a rational reaction to economic outcomes precisely assessed. In particular, the SWB of individuals may be influenced by social inequalities, in other words "socially produced differences in life chances", and not only by income inequalities as suggested by Veenhoven [23], or by personal freedom as pointed out by Haller and Hadler [8] and Beja [2].…”