Desigualdad económica y percepción social: examinando el contenido agéntico y comunal

Abstract

The economic disparities between people who have the most and the least resources have grown considerably over the last four decades (Alvaredo et al., 2018; Piketty, 2020). Globally, the richest 10% of the world’s people collect 51.7% of the total world income, while the bottom 50% collect 9.4% of it (World Inequality Database, 2020). Consequently, economic inequality has become one of the problems that today’s societies must face (Alvaredo et al., 2017), to such an extent that the social sciences have echoed the need to understand how and in what way economic inequality can affect people (Neckerman & Torche, 2007). Research suggests that economic inequality can affect people’s psychology (Buttrick & Oishi, 2017; Rodríguez-Bailón et al., 2020). For example, perceiving a high level of economic inequality can affect how individuals perceive a social environment and other people. Recent studies suggest that environments with a high level of economic inequality are perceived as highly competitive and uncooperative, and their inhabitants are seen as individualistic people who pursue their own goals rather than group goals (Sánchez-Rodríguez, Willis, et al., 2019). The main aim of this doctoral thesis was to examine the relationship between perceived economic inequality and social perception. For this purpose, we use two of the main content dimensions of social perception: agency and communion (Abele & Wojciszke, 2007, 2014).