How wealthy neighbours make you think everyone is rich

Wealthy people may be likely to oppose redistribution of wealth because they have biased information about how wealthy most people actually are.

That’s according to new research from Kent psychologists Rael Dawtry and Professor Robbie Sutton and also Dr Chris Sibley of the University of Auckland.

Their findings, published in Psychological Science, a flagship journal of the Association for Psychological Science , indicate that people use their own neighbours as a gauge of how much wealth other people possess.

As a result, the rich and poor do not simply have different attitudes about how wealth should be distributed across society. Rather, they subjectively experience living in different societies.

For more details, see the full press release.