The world's richest appear less wealthy than they really are, at least in the public's mind. However, this misconception has direct consequences on support for wealth redistribution policies.
Income inequality has widened since the 1970s, particularly in the United States, but this has not led to a major shift in public opinion regarding social justice.
According to a study conducted by Barnabas Szaszi and his team, individuals systematically underestimate the income of the wealthiest. This phenomenon was highlighted through several experiments conducted on American citizens.
In the first study, nearly 1,000 participants were asked to estimate the annual income thresholds of various percentiles of the population. The results show that most people vastly underestimate the threshold for the top 1% of the highest incomes, while being more accurate for more modest incomes.
Another group of participants, consisting of 834 citizens, took part in a similar experiment, this time with a financial incentive to encourage accurate responses. The conclusions remain the same: a marked underestimation of the highest incomes.
Two other studies used a different approach: participants were tasked with estimating the income of fictional members of an imaginary society. Once again, the research team observed a tendency to underestimate the income of the wealthiest, even when the data were presented explicitly.
This insensitivity to the wealth of the richest could be linked to a psychological phenomenon known as "scale insensitivity." People perceive very large sums of money vaguely, grouping them into broad categories such as "rich" without grasping the difference between several million or billion.
This misunderstanding could explain why calls for more equitable wealth redistribution struggle to resonate in the United States, even though inequality has never been as high.