1 SALT Lab, Department of Psychology and Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Queen's University.
2 Program in Evolution and Governance, One Earth Future Foundation, Broomfield, Colorado.
Psychol Sci. 2018 May;29(5):824-833. doi: 10.1177/0956797617748419. Epub 2018 Mar 20.
Inequality is widely believed to incite conflict, but the evidence is inconsistent. We argue that the spatial scale of competition-the extent to which individuals compete locally, with their interaction partners, or globally, with the entire population-can help settle the question. We built a mathematical model of the evolution of conflict under inequality and tested its predictions in an experimental game with 1,205 participants. We found that inequality increases conflict, destroys wealth, and engenders risk taking. Crucially, these effects are amplified by local competition. Thus, inequality is at its most damaging when it arises between close competitors. Indeed, at the extremes, the combined effects of inequality and the scale of competition are very large. More broadly, our findings suggest that disagreements in the literature may be the result of a mismatch between the scale at which inequality is measured and the scale at which conflict occurs.
人们普遍认为不平等会引发冲突，但证据并不一致。我们认为，竞争的空间尺度——个体在局部、与互动伙伴竞争还是在全局、与整个种群竞争——可以帮助解决这个问题。我们构建了一个不平等条件下冲突演变的数学模型，并在一个有 1205 名参与者的实验游戏中检验了它的预测结果。我们发现不平等会加剧冲突、破坏财富并导致冒险行为。关键的是，这些效应会因局部竞争而放大。因此，当不平等出现在紧密竞争者之间时，其破坏性最大。事实上，在极端情况下，不平等和竞争的尺度的综合效应非常大。更广泛地说，我们的研究结果表明，文献中的分歧可能是不平等的衡量尺度与冲突发生的尺度不匹配的结果。
