How Much Inequality of Earnings Do People Perceive as Just? The Effect of Interviewer Presence and Monetary Incentives on Inequality Preferences | Max-Planck-Institut für Sozialrecht und Sozialpolitik - MPISOC
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How Much Inequality of Earnings Do People Perceive as Just? The Effect of Interviewer Presence and Monetary Incentives on Inequality Preferences

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This paper describes two studies designed to test how two structural conditions of an in-terview situation – the presence of an interviewer and use of incentives – influence respon-dents’ preferences regarding inequality. According to goal-framing theory and findings from empirical justice research, different goal frames are activated in different types of relationships, producing different distributional preferences: Cooperative situations induce a normative goal frame resulting in a stronger preference for equality whereas competitive situations induce a gain frame in which individuals have stronger preferences for inequali-ty. Assuming the former type of relationship is established by the presence of an interview-er and the latter type by incentivizing, we conducted two studies to test our hypotheses. The results suggest that building a cooperative relationship through interviewer presence and cooperation priming leads to a preference for equality, while use of incentives leads to a clear preference for inequality.

Publication Details

Stefan Liebig

Meike May

Carsten Sauer

csm_Simone_Schneider_web_gro%C3%9F__C_II_e95b994ad0

Simone M. Schneider

Peter Valet

2015
https://doi.org/10.12758/mda.2015.002
S. 57–86
9
Methods, Data, Analyses