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Legitimacy Moderates the Relation Between Perceived and Ideal Economic Inequalities

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Abstract

In this paper we examined the joint effects of perceived economic inequality and legitimacy on ideal economic inequality. We hypothesized that only for those individuals who legitimize inequality, perceived inequality will be positively related to ideal inequality. Conversely, for individuals that do not legitimize inequality, a weaker relation between these variables will be observed. We tested these ideas in two studies. In Study 1, we measured perceived and ideal inequalities (i.e., pay gap) and individual differences in the legitimization of inequality. In Study 2, we measured perceived and ideal inequalities using a novel abacus procedure in which participants had to allocate resources to the different income quintiles, and we then manipulated the legitimacy (vs. illegitimacy) of economic inequality. According to our hypothesis, in both studies we found that when individuals legitimize inequality (vs. when they do not), the relation between perceived and ideal economic inequalities tends to be stronger.

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Notes

  1. Although more participants agreed to participate in the study, only 275 answered to the three main variables of our study (i.e., perceived gap, ideal gap, and opposition to equality). Given that our goal was to examine the relation among these three variables, only these 275 participants are described in this section.

  2. Forty-three participants did the study at the public library, whereas 232 did it at the bus station. There were no significant differences between these two groups in any of the measured variables (ts < 1.3; n.s.).

  3. This effect size has been calculated considering dependent t test, using the following Web site: http://www.psychometrica.de/effect_size.html.

  4. Sixteen cases were removed from the analyses because these participants answered the abacus measure incorrectly. One participant was considered an outlier (with more than 3 SD over the mean in the ideal inequality abacus measure) and was also skipped in the analyses.

  5. As previously reported, almost a quarter of participants did not understand the instructions. However, in a different study, conducted within a different research line, we found that changing the instructions given to participants made it so that only 2 out of 44 (4.45 %) participants performed the task incorrectly. In the new instructions, we first asked participants to build the most egalitarian society and the most unequal society possible. The experimenter helped those who did not follow the instructions. Then participants were asked to build their perceived and ideal societies, as in Study 2.

  6. The pseudo-Gini index can be computed using the following calculator: economics-files.pomona.edu/cconrad/GiniA.xls. The formula to calculate the Gini coefficient is: \({\text{Gini}} = \left( {\frac{2}{{\mu \cdot n^{2} }} \cdot \sum\nolimits_{k = 1}^{n} {k \cdot W_{k} } } \right) - \frac{n + 1}{n}\). Taking into account that μ is the arithmetic mean of resources (green beads) assigned among the quintiles of the society (the five abacus wooden posts); W k is the amount of resources assigned to each quintile, and it is ranked in ascending order (e.g., k = 1, 2, 3, …, n); and n is the total number of individuals among which the resources are distributed. Considering that we used a fictional society divided into quintiles, n = 5.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad for a grant to work on these topics (PSI2013-45678-P).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Departamento de Psicología Social, Universidad de Granada, Campus de Cartuja s/n, 18071, Granada, Spain

    Guillermo B. Willis, Rosa Rodríguez-Bailón & Efraín García-Sánchez

  2. Departamento de Psicología Social y de las Organizaciones, Universidad de Educación a Distancia, Juan del Rosal 14, 28040, Madrid, Spain

    Lucía López-Rodríguez

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  1. Guillermo B. Willis
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  2. Rosa Rodríguez-Bailón
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  3. Lucía López-Rodríguez
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Correspondence to Guillermo B. Willis.

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Willis, G.B., Rodríguez-Bailón, R., López-Rodríguez, L. et al. Legitimacy Moderates the Relation Between Perceived and Ideal Economic Inequalities. Soc Just Res 28, 493–508 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11211-015-0253-7

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