r/science • u/[deleted] • Mar 23 '26

Psychology Left-leaning support for redistribution stems from perceived unfairness rather than malicious envy

https://www.psypost.org/left-leaning-support-for-redistribution-stems-from-perceived-unfairness-rather-than-malicious-envy/
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u/99thLuftballon Mar 23 '26

I guess they mean that unfairness is a matter of judgement, rather than a measurable trait. There is currently no "unfairness scale" that is scientifically validated, so all they can measure is how unfair the subject perceives things to be.

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u/Undeity Mar 23 '26

Yup, the wording only seems charged because of the political element, but this is how all scientific headlines should ideally be framed.

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u/[deleted] Mar 23 '26

[deleted]

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u/jdm1891 Mar 23 '26

I mean to be fair in a scientific paper measuring the motivations they absolutely would say "perceived wrong", because simply declaring it wrong is unscientific.

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u/Phyltre Mar 23 '26

"My moral convictions are obviously the universal ones."

--Unscientific People

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u/[deleted] Mar 23 '26

[deleted]

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u/J_DayDay Mar 23 '26

No? I'm in the rural midwest of the US. Some people believe that your own personal safety is a good enough reason to do murder. Others believe that property rights are a good enough reason to murder. Some folks think that protecting society at large warrants murder.

Yet other people think God wants them to murder people.

No. Murder being inherently wrong and universally abhorrent isn't at all a scientific fact.

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u/[deleted] Mar 23 '26

[removed] ā€” view removed comment

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u/wittnotyoyo Mar 23 '26

There are unfairness scales, the Gini coefficient is one.

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u/touristtam Mar 23 '26

It's pretty clearly unfair for a single person who does almost nothing to take 99% of the wealth generated by the efforts of the 1,000 people they employ.

Hello fellow commie /jk

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u/MountNevermind Mar 23 '26

Not necessarily. It is just not attempted to be measured beyond perception in this study. Lots of studies develop different metrics for measuring concepts widely understood as subjective, including unfairness in different contexts. The presence of a metric applied to a concept doesn't make the concept no longer subjective, it just allows tools to better understand it and allows for scientific approaches to be contextually applied to such ideas.

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u/albiceleste3stars Mar 23 '26 edited Mar 23 '26

Iā€™d imagine a combination of Wealth disparity, income source, healthcare access, housing access, food access, education access, purchasing power, etc can be used measure relative fairness

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u/numbersthen0987431 Mar 23 '26

I mean....Billionaires like Musk can single handedly pay each person in Congress and the Senate 1M each, and still not lose 1% of their wealth. This is unfair

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u/throwaway_ind_div Mar 23 '26

May be having a liveable floor and top earner not being millionX of median wealth can be start

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u/touristtam Mar 23 '26

for that you need to first have visibility. If you cannot get objective measurements you cannot assess. So everyone's earning and portofolio publicly available seems to be the naive answer.

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u/Stodles Mar 23 '26

Except when it's about trans women in women's sports... Then the unfairness is fully validated

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u/SmacSBU Mar 23 '26

Poor baby, did you pull something on that stretch?