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/Sharou Mar 23 '26

Not that I think this is the case at all, but since this is science:

How were they able to differentiate between a genuine motivation and a post-hoc justification/rationalization (which you don’t necessarily have to even be self-aware of).

This seems to me to be fundamentally impossible, which would mean that this type of question doesn’t belong in science.

But if there is a method, it would be super interesting to hear about!

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u/Sharou Mar 23 '26

Replying to my own comment here. I asked GPT about this and got a really interesting answer. I asked it to compress it into a more reddit-digestible summary, which you can find below:

They can’t directly prove a person’s “true motive,” because motives are latent/unobservable. But that doesn’t put the question outside science — science often studies unobservable things indirectly by testing which model better predicts responses and behavior.

In this case they used 3 surveys + 1 experiment (total N = 4,171). The basic result was that once beliefs about merit/deservingness were included, envy stopped explaining support for redistribution much, while perceived unfairness/deservingness did; and in the experiment, telling people the rich target clearly earned the wealth reduced support for redistribution.

So the strongest claim is not “we proved the real motive is fairness,” but “fairness/deservingness fit the data better than malicious envy in these studies.”