The company you keep, offline and on, impacts your perception of America's wealth distribution problem, a recent study in Psychological Science found.
According to analyses of data, the U.S. is the most unequal developed country in the world and the wealth gap between the rich and poor is the biggest it has ever been.
But the study, published last month and pulled from surveys of 600 adults, showed that “richer and poorer people may be led, by the information available to them, to very different conclusions about how wealthy their fellow citizens are, on average, and how wealth is distributed across society.”
As explained in a press release on the research, “the findings suggest that attitudes toward wealth distribution stem from more than just an economic motivation to protect one’s self-interest or a fiscally conservative political ideology — the information provided by our surrounding environment also plays an important role.”
As information environments expand to include the Internet, less information comes from face-to-face interaction. Online, where adults are spending, on average, more than 20 hours each week, according to Ofcom’s report on media consumption habits, wealthy people mostly interact with other wealthy people and poor people mostly interact with other poor people. As a result, they get stuck in “filter bubbles,” receiving information invisibly curated for them by people and topics they like.
“Your filter bubble is the personal universe of information that you live in online — unique and constructed just for you by the array of personalized filters that now power the web,” said Eli Pariser, author of a book on filter bubbles, to Brain Pickings. This hyperpersonalization makes it possible to live comfortably, unchallenged, but also without ever encountering content that, in the case of this study, comes from someone with a different socioeconomic status.
In effect, the Internet unwittingly creates exclusive neighborhoods that mirror the ones in real life — online communities unaffected by, and unaware of, the realities of the other half. The study warns that as the wealth divide between the poor and rich in the United States grows, so too do the worlds each group inhabits.
"These results suggest that the rich and poor do not simply have different attitudes about how wealth should be distributed across society; rather, they subjectively experience living in different societies," researcher Rael Dawtry said in the press release. In effect, in wealthy neighborhoods “there is perhaps less need to distribute wealth more equally.”
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