Does Economic Inequality Make Us Worry About Our Social Status?
Perceiving high economic inequality increases people's anxiety about their social status because they believe their social environment has become intensely competitive.
Source
Economic Inequality Increases Status Anxiety Through Perceived Contextual Competitiveness
What they did
In an initial cross-sectional study, researchers surveyed a sample of 297 participants in Spain to analyze the relationship between perceived inequality, competitive climate, and status anxiety. In a second experimental study, the researchers randomly assigned a sample of 200 participants to imagine living in a fictional society with either high or low income disparities. The researchers measured how much participants expected to worry about their own social standing and how much they thought others in their same income group would worry.
What they found
The first study showed that people who perceived higher inequality reported greater status anxiety, a link that was partially explained by a highly competitive social climate. In the experiment, participants in the high-inequality condition believed that others in their social group would feel more status anxiety (an effect size of 0.36) compared to those in the low-inequality group. However, the study did not find a direct effect on participants' own status anxiety, though an indirect effect emerged through their perceptions of others' status anxiety.
The limits
What it doesn't show
The experimental manipulation did not directly change the participants' own levels of status anxiety, only how they expected others to feel. Additionally, the experimental design required participants to imagine their lives in a hypothetical society, which might not fully capture the deep-seated, long-term anxiety felt in real-world environments. Lastly, because the studies were conducted entirely within Spain—a relatively wealthy country with moderate inequality—the findings may not easily generalize to other cultural and economic systems.
Key terms
- Status anxiety
- A chronic worry about one's socioeconomic position and whether one is meeting social standards of success.
- Perceived economic inequality
- An individual's subjective estimation or awareness of the gap between the rich and the poor in a given society.
- Contextual competitiveness
- The perception that one's surrounding social environment is highly demanding and characterized by people competing against each other.
- Bimboola Paradigm
- An experimental framework where participants are asked to imagine starting a new life in a fictional society divided into distinct income groups to test the effects of economic environments.
- Descriptive norm
- A shared belief about how people actually behave, feel, or think in a given social situation.
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Quiz yourself
In the context of this study, how is status anxiety (SA) defined?
Common questions
Why didn't high inequality directly make participants feel more status anxiety in the experiment?
The authors suggest several reasons: the brief laboratory exercise may not be intense enough to alter personal anxiety in the short term, participants might find it socially undesirable to admit their own status anxiety, or the sample size may have been too small to detect a direct effect.
How did the researchers measure status anxiety?
They utilized a five-item Spanish version of the Status Anxiety scale, which asks participants to rate their agreement with statements regarding concerns over their social standing.
Does social class change these findings?
The authors controlled for participants' socioeconomic status and found that the relationship between perceived inequality and status anxiety occurs across the entire social ladder.
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