Abstract
The relationship between economic inequality and subjective well-being has produced mixed results in the literature. Conflicting evidence may be due to overlooking the role of psychosocial processes that translate socioeconomic conditions into subjective evaluations. We argue that perceiving high economic inequality erodes social capital, undermining people’s subjective well-being. We rely on the Psychosocial Model of Perceived Economic Inequality and Subjective Well-Being (PEISW), which posits that perceived economic inequality negatively affects subjective well-being by increasing status anxiety and decreasing social trust. Furthermore, these indirect effects from perceived inequality to subjective well-being will be moderated by system-justifying ideologies. The present article provides the first empirical test of this model using a national survey from Spain (N = 1,536). We confirmed that perceived economic inequality is negatively associated with well-being. We also found that perceived economic inequality had an indirect negative effect on subjective well-being via increasing status anxiety and reducing social trust. We found no evidence that system-justifying ideologies (i.e., social dominance orientation) moderated the association between perceived economic inequality and subjective well-being. We discuss that perceived economic inequality is crucial to understanding the link between economic inequality and subjective well-being and elaborate on the role of psychosocial mechanisms that promote competition and undermine social cohesion.
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Notes
We use the construct “perceived inequality” instead of “subjective inequality” given that the perceived inequality capture a descriptive estimate about the extent of inequality, while subjective inequality cover a bifactorial construct that includes qualitative statements about inequality and fairness evaluations of such inequality (Schmalor & Heine, 2022).
β = Standardized regression coefficient.
Computed as the ratio of the indirect effects to the total effect (Hayes, 2022, p. 149), βTotal indirect / βTotal effect = − 0.053/ − 0.131.
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Funding
This work was financially supported by the Grants PID2022-140252NB-I00 and PID2022-140048NB-I00 funded by MCIN/AEI/ 10.13039/501100011033, NORFACE Joint Research Programme on Democratic Governance in a Turbulent Age and co-funded by the Spain Research Agency [AEI, PCI2020-112285; PID2019-105643GB-I00], and the European Commission through Horizon 2020 under grant agreement No 822166. The sixth author of this manuscript received support from the University of Costa Rica (723-C4-004) and the Centre for Social Conflict and Cohesion Studies-COES (ANID/FONDAP/15130009).
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García-Sánchez, E., Matamoros-Lima, J., Moreno-Bella, E. et al. Perceived Economic Inequality Is Negatively Associated with Subjective Well-being through Status Anxiety and Social Trust. Soc Indic Res 172, 239–260 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-024-03306-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-024-03306-x