The Social, Decision, and Organizational Sciences Program is pleased to announce our next brown bag speaker, Dr. Kris-Stella Trump. Dr. Kris-Stella Trump, Program Director of the Anxieties of Democracy program at the Social Science Research Council, will be giving a talk titled "Income Inequality Causes Acceptance of Higher Income Differences".

Talk Abstract: This presentation will draw on experimental as well as observational data to argue that perceptions of higher inequality cause people to accept larger income differences as fair. Survey and laboratory experiments carried out in the United States and Sweden demonstrate that information about inequality increases the size of income gaps that individuals perceive to be fair. I also find that information about national income inequality does not make people more likely to agree that inequality in their country is too high. I then use cross-national survey data (from the International Social Survey Project) to show that correlations found in this non-experimental dataset are consistent with this causal story. Individuals who a) live in more unequal countries and b) perceive larger income differences in their country, accept larger income differences as fair, when compared to individuals in more equal environments. I discuss implications for how we can expect the public to react to increasing income inequality, and welcome suggestions for how to extend on this work.