Rising economic inequality is associated with more prejudice. Little empirical data, however, investigate how inequality affects individuals’ psychological processing and, in turn, exacerbates perceptions of prejudice in people’s geographic area. We hypothesized that higher perceived economic inequality triggers beliefs that unequal economies are zero-sum and leads to beliefs that people are in competition for limited resources, which may ultimately exacerbate perceived prejudice. Through nine experiments (Studies 1-5 in the manuscript and three additional studies in the Supplement), we provide evidence that higher perceived inequality increases perceived prejudice against a wide range of outgroups. Furthermore, zero-sum beliefs and perceived competition serially mediate this relationship (Studies 2 and 3). In Study 4, we investigate nuance in this hypothesized model by testing whether higher perceived economic inequality exacerbates perceived racial/ethnic prejudice among a large, diverse sample and find a similar pattern of results. Finally (Study 5), we demonstrate that assuaging competition beliefs mitigates perceived prejudice.

中文翻译：

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调查高度感知的经济不平等如何加剧群体间竞争、零和信念和感知的群体间偏见


经济不平等的加剧与更多的偏见相关。然而，很少有实证数据调查不平等如何影响个人的心理处理，进而加剧人们对所在地理区域的偏见。我们假设，感知到的经济不平等程度越高，就会引发人们认为不平等的经济是零和的，并导致人们相信人们正在争夺有限的资源，这最终可能会加剧感知到的偏见。通过九项实验（手稿中的研究 1-5 和补充材料中的三项附加研究），我们提供的证据表明，较高的感知不平等会增加对广泛的外群体的感知偏见。此外，零和信念和感知竞争连续调解了这种关系（研究 2 和 3）。在研究 4 中，我们通过测试较大的多样化样本中感知到的经济不平等是否会加剧感知到的种族/民族偏见来调查这个假设模型中的细微差别，并发现了类似的结果模式。最后（研究 5），我们证明缓解竞争信念可以减轻感知偏见。