Archive Detail

Speaker:
Tim Johnson

Tim Johnson, Willamette University: "An omnibus test of behavioral responses to material inequality "

Tim Johnson is the Grace and Elmer Goudy Associate Professor of Public Management and Policy Analysis at Willamette University’s Atkinson Graduate School of Management. His research has appeared in journals across the sciences, such as Nature and The Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences (PNAS), and his popular press articles have appeared online in venues such as The Atlantic and The Milbank Quarterly. His recent research focuses on the role of fundamental numerical properties in the evolution of social behavior. https://scholar.google.de/citations?hl=de&user=Kc0TkSwAAAAJ

Abstract: As material inequality has grown in the world writ large, studies have documented behaviors—such as last-place and rank-reversal aversion—that imply a tolerance for inequality. This evidence coincides with commentary claiming that individuals accept or favor inequality. Prior evidence, however, indicates that individuals bear costs to level randomly generated wealth inequalities and other research finds that material equality promotes pro-social behaviors. To explore the robustness of these various and discrepant findings, we study data from an experiment that pre-dated those findings; the experiment randomly assigned income to participants and, then, observed their willingness to spend money to increase or reduce others’ incomes. Analyses of the experiment do not reveal strong evidence of last-place or rank-reversal aversion, nor does it find a pronounced relationship between cooperative giving and the degree of within-group equality. Individuals pay more to increase the income of individuals with their same randomly assigned income, but mutually cooperative giving among these dyadic equals does not occur with unusual frequency. Finally, participants often increase or reduce others’ incomes with the apparent aim of leveling inequalities, but such actions do not occur more frequently than simply doing nothing. These findings raise questions about whether previously documented responses to inequality are universally applicable across task environments, or whether particular laboratory settings activate them.

If you want to participate online and have not received a link yet, you can contact Thomas Woehler (thomas.woehler@uni-konstanz.de).