Melita Davide, Rodríguez-Bailón Rosa, Willis Guillermo B
Department of Social Psychology, University of Granada, Granada, Spain.
Mind, Brain, and Behaviour Research Center (CIMCYC), Granada, Spain.
Br J Soc Psychol. 2023 Jul;62(3):1453-1468. doi: 10.1111/bjso.12641. Epub 2023 Mar 17.
Status anxiety theory posits that higher income inequality leads people to attribute more importance to their socioeconomic status and to worry about the position they occupy on the social ladder. We investigated through two experimental studies (N = 1117) the causal effect of economic inequality on status anxiety and whether expected upward and downward mobility mediates this effect. In Study 1, perceived economic inequality indirectly increased status anxiety through lesser expected upward mobility. In Study 2, perceived economic inequality decreased both expected upward and downward mobility, with opposite indirect effects on status anxiety. This suggests that the relationship between inequality and status anxiety is not straightforward, and could implicate the presence of multiple processes working at the same time-whereas lower expected downward mobility could suppress the effect of inequality, lower expected upward mobility could exacerbate it.
地位焦虑理论认为，较高的收入不平等会使人们更加重视自己的社会经济地位，并担心自己在社会阶梯上所处的位置。我们通过两项实验研究（N = 1117）调查了经济不平等对地位焦虑的因果效应，以及预期的向上和向下流动是否介导了这种效应。在研究1中，感知到的经济不平等通过较低的预期向上流动间接增加了地位焦虑。在研究2中，感知到的经济不平等降低了预期的向上和向下流动，对地位焦虑产生了相反的间接影响。这表明不平等与地位焦虑之间的关系并不简单，可能意味着同时存在多个起作用的过程——较低的预期向下流动可能会抑制不平等的影响，而较低的预期向上流动可能会加剧这种影响。
