ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Sociol.
Sec. Sociology of Stratification
This article is part of the Research Topic(Mis)perceptions of Inequality as a Social IssueView all 9 articles
Knowing One's Place? The Role of Income Inequality in Shaping Positioning Bias Across 29 Countries
Provisionally accepted
Timo Wiesner1,2,3*
Julio Iturra-Sanhueza1,3- 1University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany
- 2Research Center for Inequality and Social Policy, Faculty of Business Studies and Economics, University of Bremen, Bremen, Bremen, Germany
- 3Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences (BIGSSS), Bremen, Bremen, Germany
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This study investigates how individuals' misperceptions of their own relative position within the income distribution—referred to as positioning bias—are shaped by income inequality. Drawing upon the ISSP 2019 Social Inequality module, the analysis includes data from 31,368 individuals across 29 countries and employs multilevel modeling to test whether individuals are more likely to misperceive their own position under conditions of high inequality. In addition, we explore heterogeneity across income groups and bias types (unbiased, underestimation, overestimation). Findings reveal that inequality is related to positioning bias, though the direction and degree depend on the individuals' income position. Further, individuals in disadvantaged positions are more accurate in their self-perception when inequality is high, while those in higher-income positions tend more towards underestimating their position. Thus, the results show that higher inequality is associated with lower subjective status relative to respondents' actual position across all income groups. The research contributes to a broader debate on inequality perceptions, and redistributive preferences.
Keywords: Inequality perceptions, Income inequality, subjective social status, segregation, Multilevel modelling
Received: 23 Apr 2025; Accepted: 03 Nov 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Wiesner and Iturra-Sanhueza. 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: Timo Wiesner, timo6@uni-bremen.de
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