Pro-Wealth Or Anti-Elite Bias? Examining Attitudes Toward The Wealthy

Wealth inequality is arguably one of the most consequential societal issues today. An understudied aspect of wealth inequality is people’s spontaneous and self-reported attitudes toward the wealthy, those in the working class, and people who are poor. Across four studies, participants completed various Implicit Association Tests (Greenwald et al., 1998) to measure their bias toward wealth groups using different stimuli and ways of framing the wealthy and non-wealthy social groups. Participants also completed self-report measures and standardized scales to assess explicit attitudes toward these groups. Across these studies, participants showed biases on the implicit measures that favoured the wealthy to varying degrees of magnitude, but their self-reported attitudes showed more favourability toward the middle class, working class, and poor compared to the upper class and wealthy. These results can be situated within the broader Bias of Crowds framework and suggest that participants have acquired societal biases favouring the elite.