PSYC 363 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Class Discrimination, Economic Inequality, Materialism
12 Nov 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
1
PSYC 363 WK 7 Classism & Drug
Classism
- Beliefs, attitudes, practices, and structures that create and maintain privileges for
certain economic classes and disadvantages for other economic classes
■ Materialism
- Highly valuing money undermines happiness
- Just thinking about money weakens social connections
■ Corporate Dominance
- Of the world’s 100 largest economic entities, 51 are corporations & 49 are
countries
- Influence on mass media, governmance
■ Capitalism
Economic inequality
2
- Left - CA; right - USA
- Health and social problems
are worse in more unequal
countries
- A social identity approach to economic inequality (Jetten)
- Jetten and her co-authors use the SIA to make 5 key predictions about how
economic inequality will shape intergroup relations
1. Comparative fit: increased inequality makes wealth a more “fitting” category
to understand the social world
2. Social categorization: increased inequality makes “us” vs “them” differences
between wealth categories more salient
3. Stereotypes: increased wealth categorization leads to more developed
stereotypes about rich and poor (esp competence, warmth and morality)
4. Inequality will be perceived as unfair when
■ Wealth boundaries are seen as impermeable
- Can i become rich?
- Perception that economic social mobility is NOT possible
- BUT, this is the American/ Canadian dream! Meritocracy - you can
make it if you’re good enough
- Many people overestimate level of upward mobility,
underestimate level of downward mobility, and underestimate
the amount of economic inequality
■ Social system is perceived as unstable
- Can this system change?
3
- If economic inequality has existed a long time, or has a widely
accepted ideological rationale (eg Caste system in India),
perceived as STABLE and inequality is seen as less unfair
■ Wealth gap perceived as illegitimate
- Is this inequality justified? Why are the rich, rich, and the poor,
poor?
- When wealth is perceived to have come from hard work, seen as
legitimate
- Seen as illegitimate when perceived to have come from
corruption, tax evasion, inheritance, luck, exploitation, theft
5. Different responses based on SES - different psychological processes underlie
poor (relative deprivation) vs wealthy (status anxiety) responses to economic
inequality
Resistance
- Labor movement
- Ideologies that deter resistance
- Meritocracy and individualism
- Equal opportunity and upward social mobility
- Both wealthy and poor deserve their fates
- Rags to riches stories
- Inequality is functional
- Inequality is inevitable
- Class segregation: little positive contact
Poverty simulation past findings
