Income inequality shapes how societies stereotype groups into ambivalent versus all-good-slash-all-bad categories.

Evidence

Most countries sampled to date (nearly 50) show groups in the four quadrants illustrated in Figure 1. But countries differ in their warmth-competence correlations, which index use of the ambivalent quadrants (low competence, high warmth and vice versa; Durante et al., 2013). The United States and other countries with moderate to high income inequality (Latin America, South Africa) show many groups in the ambivalent quadrants, so they have low warmth-competence correlations. In contrast are countries with high income equality, such as Scandinavia, Australia, and much of Europe, where most groups are all-good insiders or all-bad outsiders, so they align along more of a vector: At the top are those highwarmth, high-competence in-groups included in the social-welfare safety net (all citizens); at the bottom are the low-warmth, low-competence, excluded out-groups (refugees, Roma). Countries with more income equality have a larger inclusive “us” population but also a small “them” subpopulation—and few ambivalent groups. Income inequality apparently generates more complicated lay theories (e.g., we have deserving and undeserving poor, deserving and undeserving rich). — Susan T. Fiske, Stereotype Content, 30

Categorization

• QUESTION: A genuinely intriguing causal claim worth chasing: the mechanism connecting economic stratification to the structure of folk categorization itself.
• XREF: Parallels the READER’s knowledge of how scarcity shapes moral judgments and how social stratification configures perceived deservingness. — connects to: Economic inequality is the universal form that local oppressions take. — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 337
• SEED: An essay angle: ‘who gets to be complicated’ — how economic equality lets societies see out-groups as simply bad rather than as deserving-and-undeserving mixtures.