Nations' Income Inequality Predicts Ambivalence in Stereotype Content: How Societies Mind the Gap

Abstract

Income inequality undermines societies: the more inequality, the more health problems, social tensions, and the lower social mobility, trust, life expectancy. Given people’s tendency to legitimate existing social arrangements, the Stereotype Content Model (SCM) argues that ambivalence―perceiving many groups as either warm or competent, but not both―may help maintain socio-economic disparities. The association between stereotype ambivalence and income inequality in 37 cross-national samples from Europe, the Americas, Oceania, Asia, and Africa investigates how groups’ overall warmth-competence, status-competence, and competition-warmth correlations vary across societies, and whether these variations associate with a measure of income inequality (Gini index). More unequal societies do report more ambivalent stereotypes, while more equal ones dislike competitive groups and do not necessarily respect them as competent. Unequal societies may need ambivalence for system stability: income inequality compensates groups with partially positive social images.