Social networks — friends, colleagues and neighbours — act as distorted mirrors, and people extrapolate from what they see locally and mistake it for the average.
"A lot of times we blame the fact that we tend to be friends with or form social networks with people who have similar wealth to us... and so then we assume everyone lives like we do, we think society has the same wealth we do and that there isn't much inequality," Tsvetkova explained.
If people do not observe inequality regularly, they underestimate the severity of the problem and are consequently less likely to take political stances and actions in opposition to it, according to the study
To test these dynamics, the authors conducted an online experiment involving 1,440 participants, who were placed into groups of 24. Participants were randomly assigned to be either “rich” or “poor” and were able to see the scores of only eight others.
The contrasts between conditions were striking. When poorer participants were mostly paired with other poor participants, they had little sense of how wealthy the rich actually were.
Their situation appeared normal by comparison. In these groups, poorer participants tended to vote for lower levels of redistribution. As a result, they remained materially worse off — but reported higher satisfaction and were less likely to judge the outcome as unfair.
In networks where poor participants observed many rich ones, they voted for significantly higher taxes, leading to stronger redistribution and better material outcomes for themselves. The voting behaviour of richer participants, however, changed very little across conditions.
The emotional responses told a different story. Despite ending up better off, poorer participants who were exposed to wealth reported lower satisfaction and were more likely to view the final outcome as unfair. Visibility, rather than payoff, appeared to shape how people felt about the result.
The authors conclude that increasing the visibility of wealth can raise support for redistribution — but often at the cost of heightened tension.
“When everyone observes the rich, the rich don’t really change their opinion,” Tsvetkova said.
“But the poor are the ones who start demanding more. And when you see that there is actually much more for the rich to give, that can make you unhappier than when you didn’t know the extent of their wealth or how different it was from yours.”
One reason inequality doesn't always translate into widespread anger or sustained political pressure, the study suggests, is that different income groups increasingly inhabit economically segregated social worlds.
Wealthier people tend to live in separate neighbourhoods, holiday in different places, send their children to different schools, and shop in spaces that are largely inaccessible to poorer households. The result is not simply physical separation, but parallel social lives — with limited opportunities to directly observe how others live.
According to the study, this separation helps explain why high levels of inequality can coexist with relatively low levels of social conflict. When people primarily compare themselves to others like them, inequality becomes less visible, and dissatisfaction less acute.
