Perceptions of Inequality
This III research programme examines perceptions of inequality and distributions across many domains of life – including income, health, and education. The programme aims to contribute world-class empirical and methodological research on inequality preferences, attitudes, and perceptions, as well as their drivers.
The Programme is led by Professors Frank Cowell and Joan Costa-Font. Jakob Dirksen is the Programme’s Principal Researcher.
The programme focuses on research themes and questions that concern perceptions of, and attitudes towards, the diverse forms of inequality - such as income, health, and education. Members of the research programme are involved in the study of distributional values and preferences, including behavioural determinants that can explain differences in inequality preferences across societies and social groups.
The programme’s research agenda includes applied empirical work to advance our understanding of perceptions of inequality and their potential explanations. This is based on indicators of individual attitudes and behaviours, such as interpersonal trust, social identity, ideology, poverty aversion, social cues, reference points, and the fear of being last.
The programme’s members study, for example, the sensitivity of perceptions and attitudes toward inequality to the presence or absence of absolute poverty and deprivation as well as socio-economic mobility – and who exactly is affected by these.
Moreover, of particular interest are well-documented, but less well-explained, gender differences in inequality aversion, including gender effects on risk perceptions and attitudes, trust and pro-social behaviours, locus of control, and time preferences, as well as other behavioural determinants (empathy, guilt, shame, etc). It is thereby also committed to an explicitly intersectional approach that considers additional self-identified reference groups.
The programme also makes methodological contributions that help compare and identify the best techniques to elicit individual and collective perceptions, preferences, and attitudes - spanning experimental methods from psychology, economics, and behavioural science, as well as the use of quantitative and qualitative surveys, and observational techniques from the social sciences.