Support for redistribution is shaped by compassion, envy, and self-interest, but not a taste for fairness

Why do people support economic redistribution? Hypotheses include inequity aversion, a moral sense that inequality is intrinsically unfair, and cultural explanations such as exposure to and assimilation of culturally transmitted ideologies. However, humans have been interacting with worse-off and be...

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Published inProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS Vol. 114; no. 31; pp. 8420 - 8425
Main Authors Sznycer, Daniel, Seal, Maria Florencia Lopez, Sell, Aaron, Lim, Julian, Porat, Roni, Shalvi, Shaul, Halperin, Eran, Cosmides, Leda, Tooby, John
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published United States National Academy of Sciences 01.08.2017
Subjects
Aversion
Biological Sciences
Data processing
Emotions
Inequality
Motivation
Players
Self interest
Social Sciences
Taste
fairness
inequality
redistribution
emotion
morality
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Summary:Why do people support economic redistribution? Hypotheses include inequity aversion, a moral sense that inequality is intrinsically unfair, and cultural explanations such as exposure to and assimilation of culturally transmitted ideologies. However, humans have been interacting with worse-off and better-off individuals over evolutionary time, and our motivational systems may have been naturally selected to navigate the opportunities and challenges posed by such recurrent interactions. We hypothesize that modern redistribution is perceived as an ancestral scene involving three notional players: the needy other, the better-off other, and the actor herself. We explore how three motivational systems—compassion, self-interest, and envy—guide responses to the needy other and the better-off other, and how they pattern responses to redistribution. Data from the United States, the United Kingdom, India, and Israel support this model. Endorsement of redistribution is independently predicted by dispositional compassion, dispositional envy, and the expectation of personal gain from redistribution. By contrast, a taste for fairness, in the sense of (i) universality in the application of laws and standards, or (ii) low variance in group-level payoffs, fails to predict attitudes about redistribution.
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Edited by Susan T. Fiske, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, and approved June 21, 2017 (received for review March 7, 2017)
Author contributions: D.S., M.F.L.S., and J.L. designed research; D.S., R.P., and S.S. performed research; D.S. analyzed data; and D.S., A.S., S.S., E.H., L.C., and J.T. wrote the paper.
ISSN:0027-8424
1091-6490
DOI:10.1073/pnas.1703801114