Social Class Competence Stereotypes Are Amplified by Socially Signaled Economic Inequality

A number of psychological theories suggest that increased economic inequality may lead to greater social class stereotyping. However, all existing evidence for this claim is correlational. Across three experiments (one exploratory and two confirmatory, N = 2,286), we observed that exposure to socially signaled inequality-operationalized in terms of variation in perceived incomes among groups of target individuals-amplified the endorsement of one key social class stereotype: the perception that higher income individuals are more competent. When judged amid greater inequality, the same high-income targets were perceived as more competent and the same low-income targets were perceived as less competent, compared with when judged amid greater equality. By contrast, we found no consistent effect of exposure to inequality on stereotypes regarding warmth and relatively weak class-based stereotyping on the warmth dimension in general. We discuss implications of these findings for theories regarding the effects of economic inequality.