Received: 13 July 2016 Revised: 30 December 2016 Accepted: 3 January 2017 1 DOI 10.1111/spc3.12304 S P C 3 1 2 3 0 4 No. of Pages: 12 ME: 2 Journal Code Article ID Dispatch: 1.01.1 CE: Albina, Aloha Marie 3 4 ARTICLE 5 6 7 8 The psychological consequences of income 9 inequality 10 11 Q112Q2 Nicholas R. Buttrick | Shigehiro Oishi 13 14 University of Virginia Abstract 15 Correspondence 16 Nicholas R. Buttrick, Department of In this paper, we review and integrate the contemporary literature 17 Psychology, Gilmer Hall, P.O. Box 400400, on the societal effects of income inequality, drawing on social, per- Charlottesville, VA 22904‐4400, USA. sonality, developmental, and organizational psychology, sociology, 18 Email:
[email protected] 19 political science, economics, and public health. Living in highly 20 unequal regimes is associated with both increased mistrust and 21 increased anxiety about social status; these psychological mecha- 22 nisms help explain some of the negative outcomes associated with 23 income inequality, such as lower happiness, lower social cohesion, 24 weaker morality, higher mortality, worse health, and weaker 25 governance. 26 27 28 1 | INTRODUCTION 29 30 Income inequality, the increasing concentration of wealth in fewer hands, has been called the “defining challenge of 31 our time”(Obama, 2013). The share of the total wealth in the US owned by the top 0.1% of the population, about 32 160,000 households, has grown from 7% in 1978 to 22% in 2012, the highest levels since the Great Depression (Saez 33 & Zucman, 2016).