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The present study aims to know if Perceived Economic Inequality in Everyday Life (PEIEL) during the coronavirus crisis influences intolerance of inequality, attitudes towards redistribution and empathy.

The study aims to demonstrate the effect of perceived inequality on status anxiety. We predict that when people perceive to live in more unequal societies they suffer more status anxiety.

Our laboratory's Implementation of the Dijksterhuis RRR protocol

Our laboratory's Implementation of the Mazar_Srull RRR protocol

We will carry out exploratory, experimental and confirmatory studies to verify to what extent the promotion of entrepreneurship could be used as a legitimating ideology. If social being determines our consciousness, it can be expected that the ruling class, possessing the “spiritual means of production", will promote certain ideologies faourable to their interests as a (complementary) way to keep power. We suspect that entrepreneurship ideology may work as a short of Divide et Impera. We also suspect that favourable attitudes toward entrepreneurship depends more on situational variables (i.e. the social being or place that a person occupies in the mode of production, including the “matter ideas” received throughout life) than on personality traits of individuals, which would dismantle the myth of the “Schumpeterian entrepreneur” (e.g. Schumpeter, Cantner, Gartner, Kerr et al). GENERAL HYPOTHESIS We expect an interaction between social class and ideology. Those who, because of their social being, are in need, that is, poor (H1) and unemployed (H2) and in whom they have a chance, that is, rich (H3) and people with studies (H4), will be more favorable to entrepreneurship, compared to the rest of participants located in central positions in terms of social class. We also propose that a favorable attitude towards entrepreneurship will correlate positively with justification of the capitalist system and false consciousness (H5) and negatively with measures of class consciousness and collective actions (H6). It is expected that, in general, working-class / poor people will score higher in class consciousness than rich people (H7). In turn, the former will score lower than the last in justification of the capitalist system (H8). On the other hand, working-class / poor conscious people will have less intention toward entrepreneurship than alienated working / poor people (H9 and H10). At the same time, we propose that those people who have received training for entrepreneurship and / or have heard or read stories on the type of the American Dream will also be more favourable towards entrepreneurship (H11) and will, consequently, have lower class consciousness and higher justification of the system (H12 and H13) that those people who have not done so. HYPOTHESES TO COMPARE CUBA AND SPAIN 1. The same in Cuba and in Spain; same population group favorable to entrepreneurship, by necessity (the poorest) and by opportunity (the richest, with capital, contacts, etc.). 2. The same; people more favorable to entrepreneurship in turn lower class consciousness. 3. The same; people more favorable to entrepreneurship in turn higher justification of the capitalist system. 4. The same; Those who have received training or have read about the American Dream will have a more favorable attitude towards entrepreneurship. 5. The same; Those who have received training or have read about the American Dream will have lower class consciousness. 6. The same; Those who have received training or have read about the American Dream will have a higher justification of the system. 7. Different in Cuba and in Spain; in Spain, activists (i.e. people with high CC and low JCS) against the government. In Cuba more in favor .. 8. Different; in general terms, higher CC and lower JCS in Cuba than in Spain. METHODOLOGY Class Consciousness and Justification of the Capitalist System Scales will be used. The former (CC) will be created based on Collective Actions scales being used by Social Identity Approach, Class Consciousness and Marxist Theory (Marx, Hanappi, Keefer, Tajfel, Turner, Reicher, Tausch et al). The former will be the System Justification and False Consciousness scales used by the System Justification theory (Jost et al). Several scales measuring attitudes toward entrepreneurship will be also included. We will carry out exploratory, experimental, and confirmatory studies in Cuba and Spain. Using an experimental design, self-reported upper and lower-class participants will be exposed to examples of individual business success. Subsequently, Class consciousness and System Justification beliefs will be measured.

In this study, we want to replicate one of the experiments of Davidai (2018).

This study aims to test the main effect of perceived economic inequality on affective and political polarization. Rationale: Perceived economic inequality undermines social cohesion by reducing trust and solidarity (Neville, 2012; Paskov & Dewilde, 2012; Uslaner & Brown, 2005). In this research, we suggest that economic inequality is also related to another indicator of reduced social cohesion. That is, perceived inequality is related to forming negative attitudes towards outgroup members (i.e. affective polarization). It has been suggested that adverse economic conditions are a contributing factor to affective polarization. A recent study showed that high levels of wealth redistribution can prevent the emergence of polarization (Stewart, Plotkin, & McCarthy, 2021). However, the link between perceived economic inequality and affective polarization remains understudied. Furthermore, we examine the extent to which such an association is moderated by individual differences such as ideologies, identities, and threats. We argue that these moderators shape the way how perceived economic inequality influences affective and issue polarization. We expect that the positive relationship between perceived economic inequality and polarization will be undermined by high system-justifying ideologies and national identification because of their palliative effect; and will be amplified by high status anxiety because of its threatening effect.

This study aims to demonstrate the effect of perceived inequality on status anxiety. We predict that when people perceive to live in more unequal societies they suffer more status anxiety

An experimental study will be carried out in order to test the idea that perceptions of income mobility have a positive effect on tolerance towards economic inequality. This is a replica of the study that Shariff, Wiwad and Aknin (2016) conducted in The United States. The only differences that distinguish the current research from the one mentioned above are that the target population is altered to be people with the Spanish nationality and that another dependent variable is introduced: attitudes towards income redistribution through taxes. In short, we predict that participants in the high (vs the low) mobility condition will show a) greater tolerance toward inequality, b) less support for redistribution through taxes.

The current pandemic threat (Covid-19) and the economic context derived from it, could contribute to changes in intergroup and intragroup psychosocial mechanisms, and in turn, this may have consecuences on ideology and intent to reverse the economic system. In previous studies (https://osf.io/sr2nz/?view_only=287213595094453a84e169627a584a00), we have analyzed the processes that involeved shared social identity and the interdependent self-construal, undestood as differente ways of achieving social change. In this Study 2, we want to confirm these found results and explore if there are changes between the last wave of the pandemic and the current one.

Resumen (Spanish) En este estudio analizamos la percepción de la desigualdad económica en España según las experiencias cotidianas e ideología política de las personas. Mediante técnicas de análisis de contenido procesamos 705 respuestas abiertas de 290 personas y usamos análisis de redes para examinar las relaciones entre las categorías identificadas. Identificamos que la desigualdad económica se percibe principalmente desde la comparación social y la privación relativa entre personas/grupos. También encontramos que la desigualdad económica se percibió más en términos de justicia social cuando las personas situaron a la izquierda (vs. derecha) del espectro político. Discutimos cómo la percepción de la desigualdad económica es un fenómeno multidimensional, situado en la vida cotidiana y condicionado por las ideologías, que sirve para (des)legitimar las desigualdades. Abstract (English) In this study we analyze how economic inequality is perceived in Spain according to people's everyday life and political ideology. We used content analysis techniques to process 705 responses (10,626 words) from 290 participants, and performed network analyzes to determine the relationships between the identified categories. The results suggest that economic inequality is perceived through social comparison and relative deprivation between people and / or groups. We also found that economic inequality was perceived more in terms of social justice when people positioned themselves to the left (vs. right) of the political spectrum. We discuss how the perception of economic inequality is a multidimensional phenomenon, located in everyday life and conditioned by ideologies, which serve as a way to (de)legitimate social inequalities

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An experimental study to test whether the perceived income mobility has a positive effect on tolerance toward economic inequality will be ran. This is a replication of the study that Shariff, Wiwad, and Aknin (2016) carried out in the United States (but using a Spanish sample).

In this study we will test whether the perceived economic inequality and status anxiety normative climate affect individuals' own status anxiety.

We study how the perception of greater or lesser economic inequality influences perceptions of one's own economic mobility and causal attributions.

In this study, we will test whether the perceived economic inequality affects individual and normative civic participation, individual and normative social participation, and generalized trust.

This study will analyze the polarization about certain current topics in Spain and its relation to perceived economic inequality.

This study will explore the effect of economic inequality on polarization in Spain referred to immigrants limitation of mobility.

Previous research has documented that the educational system contributes to justifying and legitimizing social inequalities in society, by orienting individuals toward low or high status positions (i.e., the selection function, see Darnon et al., 2009) on the bases of their supposed merit (Batruch et al., 2019). As such, education tends to transform social-class disparities into 'merit-based' differences (Darnon et al., 2018; Kuppens et al., 2018). For these reasons, we argue that belief in school meritocracy should be an important component of the acceptance of social inequalities, beyond inequalities that lie in school. Supporting this idea, research has shown that belief in meritocracy in society (i.e., descriptive meritocracy, Son Hing et al., 2011) is a system justifying belief in the sense that it leads people (both low and high status group members) into accepting the idea that they deserve their position in the hierarchy and accept some forms of inequalities (Madeira et al., 2019). More recently, belief in school meritocracy (BSM) has been shown to lower parents’ support to the promotion of equalizing interventions in the school of their children (Darnon et al., 2018). That is to say, the belief that the educational system sorts individuals through a highly meritocratic process offers a rational explanation of social inequalities to be attributed more to merit (or the lack thereof) rather than (uncontrollable) external factors. In the survey, BSM will be tested as an antecedent of perceptions of different status people, perception of the system and support for populism. Moreover, we will test the mediation of these relationships by economic system justification attitudes

We are interested in the consequences of self-enhancement on ideal economic inequality, and attitudes toward economic inequality and redistribution.

In this study, we analyse the relationship between economic inequality in different domains and attitudes towards its reduction.

In the last decades, the deepening of economic inequalities together with their legitimation by the general population, have been receiving increased attention. This paper intends to test the role of Belief in a Just World (BJW; Lerner, 1980) in the legitimation of economic inequalities. Using data from 47,086 participants from 27 European countries (European Social Survey, 2018), we found that BJW positively predicted the legitimation of economic inequality, measured by three different indicators: the perceived fairness of the overall wealth inequality, and the fairness attributed to the earnings made by the Top 10% and the Bottom 10% of society. These results persisted when variables, both at the individual level (i.e., religiosity, income, education, gender, political ideology and equality of opportunity beliefs) and at the country-level (i.e., Human Development Index, Gini index), were taken into account. Moreover, the effect of BJW was stronger at legitimating the incomes of the bottom 10% than legitimating the incomes of the top 10%. We also found that the country level economic inequality, measures through different indicators, reduced the effect of BJW on legitimation of inequality. Finally, BJW revealed to have a negative indirect effect on support for redistribution, via the legitimation of economic inequalities.

This research aims to investigate the link between perceived economic inequality and personal and collective threats (i.e., people’s concerns about issues that can affect them either personally or that affect society as a whole). It will also test the mediating role of these threats in the relationship between perceived economic inequality and different outcomes such as affective polarization (towards political, socioeconomic and social groups) and collective action participation. Finally, we will also explore the moderating role of SES and political orientation.

Perceived economic inequality represents a type of economic threat regarding society's well-being. Such perceptions of economic inequality exacerbate the salience of social class, which in turn can increase animosities toward different social groups. This study aims to test the main effect of perceived economic inequality on affective polarization. Furthermore, we examine whether such an effect is explained (mediated) by the undermining of political and social trust.