This summary is provided by the IPR Behavioral Insights Research Center based on the original study by Northwestern University
Hannah B. Waldfogel and colleagues delved into who notices inequality and when.
A series of five studies was conducted with a total of 8,779 participants.
Key findings include:
- Considering differences in basic attention to inequality can shed light on the growing ideological polarization characteristic of contemporary policy debates.
- Those who were higher on the egalitarian scale were more likely to naturalistically mention inequality when showed a variety of everyday social scenes.
- They were also faster to detect inequality-relevant changes to visual scenes (versus anti-egalitarians).
- Egalitarians were not more likely (and were sometimes less likely) than anti-egalitarians to notice when inequality negatively impacted traditionally advantaged groups.
- When shown a video of a panel discussion where women spoke more than men, there was no significant difference in how accurate high- and low-egalitarian participants were at noticing whether men or women spoke more.
