I choose to be powerful: Economic inequality encourages preferences of power over status positions

ABSTRACT

People living in unequal societies tend to worry about their social status. In this paper, we argue that inequality may have a greater impact on a similar but conceptually different process: choice for power. For this purpose, we conducted two experimental preregistered studies in which inequality within a fictional society was manipulated. Afterwards, we measured the degree of preference and choice for a job with either power or status. We found no evidence that people preferred more power in contexts of high inequality versus low inequality. However, the results of the two studies revealed that the percentage of people who chose a position of power (vs. status) in the high inequality condition was greater than that of the low inequality condition. The effects of economic inequality only appeared when we forced the choice between power and status. This result expands the literature on consequences of economic inequality on power and status.

KEYWORDS:

• Economic inequality
• power
• status
• status anxiety

Availability of data and material

The databases and the material can be found in this link of OSF https://osf.io/ckxzp/?view_only=3133e195c5574a7d9196f1b6fa9c6fb9

Consent to participate

All participants signed anonymous consent to participate in both studies.

Consent for publication

All authors consent to the publication of this paper.

Disclosure Statement

The authors declare that there are no potential conflicts of interest with respect on the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Ethics approval

The reported studies were approved by the ethical committee of the University of Granada (Ethics Clearance ID: 170/CEIH/2016).

Notes

¹ In addition, all the measurement materials are online in the OSF project (https://osf.io/ckxzp/?view_only=006c228cb01f4dbb9b94be7a396b517b)

² Additional exploratory results from Experiment 1a showed that inequality (variable M) moderated the relationship between power (X) and status (Y). This result led us to preregister this hypothesis also in the second study, along with the two presented in the text. However, because we could not replicate this moderation, we decided not to include it in the text, as we do not describe the rationale behind this effect that was not corroborated in Experiment 1b (to see the preregistration of this hypothesis, see the OSF link: https://osf.io/j4vpg/?view_only=6dadc37a842a4f8abb54aee4cdb7bc5b).

³ In addition, we included more questions to investigate the relationship between power and status (we do not include these results in the text as, following exploratory analysis, we did not find any suggestive results).

⁴ Some degrees of freedom were missing because of missing values.

⁵ The instructions are similar to the high economic inequality condition. Since in the condition of low (vs high) economic inequality there were lower differences between the richest and the poorest, the difference in the economic value of the houses and cars between rich and poor was accordingly lower.:

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by two research projects funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science: ‘Hierarchy and Social Distance: Two Psychosocial Mechanisms Generated by Economic Inequality’ (Ref.PID2019-105643GB-I00/AEI/10.13039/501100011033) and ‘Alliance Processes in Facing Threats to Identity and Perceived Control’ (Ref.PID2019-111549GB-I00/AEI/10.13039/501100011033).