It’s Not Really about How the Game is Played; It’s about Whether You Win or Lose

• In Event: 4354 - Social Psychology

Abstract

The increase in income inequality has raised concerns about the social legitimacy of economic disparities and popular support for redistribution aiming to correct them. We design a lab experiment – a simple two-person card game that simulates real-life dynamics of inequality – to disentangle the effects of both inequality of opportunity and inequality of outcomes, two factors that are confounded in empirical settings. We find that as outcome inequality becomes more rooted in an unequal distribution of opportunity, individuals are less likely to perceive economic inequality as skill-based, more likely to attribute inequality to luck, and less likely to judge such economic disparities as fair. However, these aggregate trends hide large perceptual discrepancies between winners and losers, according to which the former are much more prone to see economic inequality as fair and skill-based and the latter are more inclined to perceive inequality as the product of luck and thus unfair. The magnitude of these gaps is such that the effect of personal success overrides that of inequality of opportunity. In other words: it’s more about “whether you win or lose”, than it is about “how you play the game”.

Authors

• Mario Molina, Cornell University

• Mauricio Bucca, Cornell University

• Michael W. Macy, Cornell University