ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Personality and Social Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1531682
This article is part of the Research Topic(Mis)perceptions of Inequality as a Social IssueView all 3 articles
Seeing is Believing: Believing in a Just World Reduces Perceived Inequality
Provisionally accepted
- University of Mannheim, Mannheim, Germany
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Inequality is one of the most pressing social issues, yet people often disagree on the extent of inequality they subjectively perceive and how to evaluate it. Without a common understanding of inequality, a consensus on how to address it can hardly be reached. Across three studies, using four separate samples (Ns between 543 and 36,281), and employing different paradigms, we considered the role of just world beliefs and meritocracy to explain individual differences in perceived inequality. Study 1, a pre-registered experiment, manipulated fairness beliefs about society and found a causal impact on perceived inequality. Study 2 corroborated this result in two German representative surveys. Study 3, a multilevel analysis across 40 countries found that this relationship generalizes across countries and cultures. Overall, the results emphasize the importance of fairness beliefs to explain individual differences in subjective inequality and may thus help to understand and resolve contemporary debates on how to address inequality.
Keywords: Perceived inequality, Belief in a just world, Motivated reasoning, Subjective inequality, Meritocratic beliefs
Received: 20 Nov 2024; Accepted: 10 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 John and Bless. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Melvin John, University of Mannheim, Mannheim, Germany
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