The Global Economic Inequality Research Project

An international research collaboration on cross-country economic inequality

The project

Although research on economic inequality is probably the fastest growing area within psychology, prior work focuses almost exclusively on economic inequality within nations while largely ignoring differences between nations. Many economists and sociologists have argued that the economic prosperity and affluent lifestyle of nations of the “Global North” are intrinsically linked to the relative poverty of developing nations (Lessenich, 2016). In an economically and ecologically unequal exchange, rich countries (a) exploit resources and cheap labor forces of developing countries, (b) externalize environmental costs of production and consumption (see hazardous waste trade), and (c) restrict mobility to citizens of developing nations (global mobility divide, Mau et al., 2012). Although people often underestimate within-nation economic inequality (Norton & Ariely, 2012; Galdi, Maass et al., 2017), little is known about the perception of inequality between nations (World Inequality Report, 2018; Global Wealth & Income Data Base).
​
This international collaboration is led by a team of Italian researchers and aims at understanding how citizens from developed and developing countries perceive and explain inequalities between nations and how they process information regarding global inequality.

Our team includes collaborators from 42 countries:

---

This project is supported by grant PRIN 2017 #2017924L2B of the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research (MIUR), entitled “The psychology of economic inequality”, to Prof. Anne Maass.

 To contact us, send an email to: [email protected]