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\title{How should we think about Americans’ beliefs about economic mobility?}

\author{
Shai Davidai\thanks{The New School for Social Research. Email:
  davidais@newschool.edu.}
\and
Thomas Gilovich\thanks{Cornell University}
}

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\newcommand{\jhead}{Judgment and Decision Making, Vol.~13, No.~3}
\newcommand{\jdate}{May 2018}
\pagestyle{myheadings} \markright{\protect\small \href{\jref}{\jhead}, \jdate \hfill Conceptualizing perceptions of social mobility \qquad}
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\href{\jref}{\jhead}, \jdate, pp.\ 297-304
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\begin{onecolabstract}
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Recent evidence suggests that Americans’ beliefs about upward mobility
are overly optimistic. Davidai \& Gilovich (2015a), Kraus \& Tan
(2015), and Kraus (2015) all found that people overestimate the
likelihood that a person might rise up the economic ladder, and
underestimate the likelihood that they might fail to do so. However,
using a different methodology, Chambers, Swan and Heesacker (2015)
reported that Americans’ beliefs about mobility are much more
pessimistic. Swan, Chambers, Heesacker and Nero (2017) provide a
much-needed summary of these conflicting findings and question the
utility of measuring population-level biases in judgments of inequality
and mobility. We value their summary but argue that their conclusion is
premature. By focusing on measures that best tap how laypeople
naturally think about the distribution of income, we believe that
researchers can draw meaningful conclusions about the public’s
perceptions of economic mobility. When more ecologically representative
measures are used, the consistent finding is that Americans
overestimate the extent of upward mobility in the United States. To
explain the divergent findings in the literature, we provide evidence
that the methods used by Chambers et al.\ (2015) inadvertently primed
participants to think about \textit{im}mobility rather than mobility.
Finally, using a novel method to examine beliefs about economic
mobility, we show that Americans indeed overestimate the degree of
mobility in the United States. 

\smallskip
\noindent
Keywords: social mobility, inequality, political ideology, lay beliefs
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{\renewcommand{\thefootnote}{}

\footnotetext{



Copyright: \copyright\ 2018.
The authors license this article under the terms of the
\href{http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/}{Creative Commons
  Attribution 3.0 License.}
}}

\saythanks

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\section{Introduction}

The rise of economic inequality in the United States over the past four
decades (Piketty \& Saez, 2014) has been associated with a host of
negative consequences at the individual, interpersonal, and societal
levels (Payne, 2017). Nevertheless, despite living in one of the
Western world’s most economically unequal countries, the rising gap
between the rich and the poor in the United States does not appear to
be a major concern for most Americans (Pew Research Center, 2012;
Gallup, 2016). Bernie Sanders’ failed Democratic primary bid
notwithstanding, economic inequality played a relatively minor role in
the campaigns run by the two major parties in the most recent U.S.
Presidential election, with the candidates focusing instead on
immigration, terrorism, and personal scandal. Why do Americans seem so
willing to accept vast economic inequality?

One reason for this apparent tolerance of inequality may lie in people’s
beliefs about meritocracy and upward mobility (Kluegel \& Smith, 1986).
Americans may be willing to accept large discrepancies between the
“haves” and the “have-nots” because they believe that people can easily
rise up the economic ladder. But can they? How accurate are Americans’
beliefs about economic mobility? We have found that Americans appear to
have unrealistic ideas about upward mobility in the U.S., believing
that people are significantly more likely to rise up the economic
ladder than they actually are. When we asked a large, nationally
representative sample of adults to estimate the future relative
standing of a person born to a family in the poorest 20\% of the income
distribution, respondents significantly underestimated the likelihood
of remaining there and significantly overestimated the likelihood of
rising to the middle quintile or higher (Davidai \& Gilovich, 2015a).
Shortly after our paper was published, Kraus \& Tan (2015) likewise
reported that participants systematically overestimate the chances of
rising up the economic ladder (e.g., indicating that an individual has
roughly a one-in-six chance of rising from the bottom to the top
quintile of the income distribution when the actual likelihood is
closer to one-in-twenty). Thus, Americans seem to overestimate the
degree of upward mobility in the United States (for a pre-registered
replication, see Kraus, 2015). 

But whereas Davidai \& Gilovich (2015a), Kraus and Tan (2015), and Kraus
(2015) found that people overestimate the likelihood of rising up the
economic ladder, Chambers, Swan and Heesacker (2015) reported data
indicating that Americans \textit{under}estimate the degree of upward
mobility in the United States. In addressing these conflicting
findings, Swan, Chambers, Heesacker, and Nero (2017) conclude that
studying the accuracy of lay beliefs about economic mobility is
“\textit{the wrong target for judgment and decision making
scientists},” who would be better off channeling “\textit{future
efforts away from the question of population-level bias}.” Although we
sympathize with the desire to move on from a topic that elicits such
diametrically opposed findings, we believe there is still much to be
learned about lay beliefs about inequality and economic mobility.
Whether people overestimate or underestimate upward mobility has
considerable practical importance, and resolving the inconsistencies in
the results to date can shed light on basic processes of human
judgment. Thus, rather than attributing the diverging findings to
“\textit{methodological fragility}” (Swan et al., 2017), we believe it
is important to examine which methods of assessment best capture
people’s underlying beliefs about economic mobility.

To do so, it is necessary to understand why Chambers et al.\ (2015)
reached such different conclusions from those of Davidai \& Gilovich
(2015a), Kraus \& Tan (2015), and Kraus (2015). How can seemingly
similar approaches lead to such divergent conclusions about lay beliefs
about mobility? The answer, like the devil, is in the details, and it
is the nuanced effects of these details that we explore here. Like Swan
et al., (2017), we believe that subtle methodological differences
influenced each research group’s findings and, as a consequence, the
conclusions drawn. However, we argue that the different methods of
assessment are not equally effective at tapping people’s underlying
beliefs about economic mobility. When researchers use measures that
more closely fit with how people naturally think about the distribution
of income, a reliable pattern emerges.

\section{How should psychologists think about economic inequality and mobility?}

At the heart of judgment and decision making research is the insight
that judgments can be pushed around by small, seemingly minor features
of the prevailing context. People’s judgments are powerfully influenced
by the order of the questions asked (Strack, Martin \& Schwarz, 1988),
the framing of the prospects presented (Kahneman \& Tversky, 1984), the
numerical values of the response scales used (Schwarz, Knauper,
Hippler, Noelle-Neuman \& Clark, 1991), and by whether options are
assessed in isolation or in the presence of other alternatives (Davidai
\& Shafir, 2018; Hsee, 1996), whether respondents are asked to accept
or reject different alternatives (Shafir, 1993), whether respondents
are asked to opt-in or opt-out of a course of action (Davidai,
Gilovich \& Ross, 2012), and so forth. Nevertheless, just as the
malleability of political attitudes does not imply that it is
impossible to tap people’s underlying political ideology and that
opinion polls are therefore useless, the fact that judgments of
mobility are influenced by question wording does not imply that
psychologists should give up on the quest to better understand people’s
beliefs about economic mobility. 

Indeed, given what has been learned in the past half-century from
research on judgment and decision making, it would be surprising if
judgments of mobility were \textit{not }influenced by subtle
differences in research methods, and there are many such differences in
the methods used by Davidai \& Gilovich (2015a) and Chambers et al.,
(2015). For example, whereas Davidai \& Gilovich (2015a) asked
participants to think about an \textit{individual’s likelihood} of
rising up the economic ladder \textit{in the future}, Chambers et al.,
(2015) asked them to consider the \textit{frequency} \textit{of a
cohort} \textit{of} \textit{individuals} who had experienced
mobility/immobility \textit{in the past}. Given that different mental
processes are recruited in judgments of probabilities versus
frequencies (Kahneman, 2011), it is to be expected that people would
judge an individual’s likelihood of rising up the economic ladder
differently than the proportion of people who had experienced such
mobility. And given that people put more weight on effort and free will
when thinking about events in the future than in the past (Helzer \&
Gilovich, 2012), it is not surprising that they would expect more
mobility in the future than the past. Finally, to the extent that the
label “lower class” brings to mind negative associations that go beyond
mere income or wealth, it is not surprising that characterizing people
at the bottom of the income distribution as “lower class” (as Chambers
et al., 2015 did) might lead participants to think in terms of
\textit{im}mobility rather than mobility. It is likely that any subset
of these methodological differences contributed to the conflicting
findings highlighted by Swan et al.\ (2017). 

But arguably the most consequential difference between the methods used
by Davidai \& Gilovich (2015a), Kraus \& Tan (2015), and Kraus (2015),
on the one hand, and those used by Chambers et al., (2015), on the
other, is how the researchers divided the economic distribution in the
United States. Whereas the former researchers asked participants to
estimate movement up or down an economic ladder with five rungs
(labeled as the richest 20\%, the second-richest 20\%, the middle 20\%,
the second-poorest 20\%, and the poorest 20\%), Chambers et al.\ (2015)
asked them to estimate mobility along three rungs—the lower class, the
middle class, and the upper class. Although this difference in the
depiction of the economic distribution might seem trivial, we believe
that it goes a long way toward explaining the conflicting findings
regarding judgments of mobility. Swan et al.\ (2017) would surely agree.
This point, in essence, was one of the main claims in their paper. But,
unlike them, we also argue that the 5-rung approach better taps how
both laypeople and experts naturally tend to think about mobility. 

To uncover people’s underlying beliefs about mobility, it is therefore
essential to know how people naturally think about the distribution of
income. Do people tend to see society as divided into five income
quintiles, or as a 3-rung ladder split into the lower, middle, and
upper classes?

To examine this question, we surveyed two hundred four participants on
Mechanical Turk (137 females, M\textsubscript{age} = 36.20) about their
views about economic groupings in the United States. Participants first
read the following: “People often talk about social mobility as an
‘income ladder’ on which people move up or down. When you think of the
‘income ladder’ in the United States and the different economic groups
on each level, what comes to mind?” We then presented participants with
two images adapted from Swan et al.\ (2017) — one depicting a 3-rung
ladder and one depicting a 5-rung ladder — and asked them to choose the
image that best describes how they think about the ‘income ladder’ in
the U.S. 

We obtained unequivocal evidence that laypeople think about American
society in terms of five — not three — distinct economic groups. Eighty-two
percent of the respondents stated that they think of the economic
distribution in the United States as split into five quintiles, and
only 18\% stated that they thought about it in terms of tertiles,
$\chi^2$(1) = 89.63, \textit{p }{\textless}
.0001. Thus, the vast majority of participants think of the income
distribution in the United States as a 5-rung ladder.\footnote{ To
ensure that this result was not an artifact of people thinking that a
prototypical “ladder” has more than three rungs, we replicated this
study with the same instructions, but with no reference to the term
“ladder.” Specifically, we told ninety Mechanical Turk participants (48
females, M\textsubscript{age} = 35.47): “People often talk about social
mobility in terms of moving up or down into different economic
categories or levels” and then asked them,~“When you think of the
different economic categories or levels in the United States, which of
the following set of categories comes to mind?” We then presented
participants with two images — one depicting 3 separate bins
(\textit{upper class, middle class, }and \textit{lower class}) and one
depicting 5 bins (\textit{upper class, upper-middle class, middle
class, lower-middle class, }and \textit{lower class}\textit{)}.
Seventy-one percent of the respondents stated that they think of the
economic distribution as split into five categories, and only 29\%
stated that they thought about it in terms of three categories,
$\chi^2$(1) = 16.56, \textit{p }{\textless}
.0001.} 

To assess the robustness of this result, we asked a separate sample of
ninety-eight Mechanical Turk participants (50 females,
M\textsubscript{age} = 37.88) to first describe in their own words
where they believe they stand on the economic ladder. They were then
asked how many positions there are higher up the economic ladder than
their own, and how many positions there are lower down. For each
question, participants chose one of four options (\textit{0-I am on the
highest/lowest rung on the economic ladder; 1-There is one more rung
higher up/lower down on the economic ladder; 2-There are two more rungs
higher up/lower down on the economic ladder; +3-There are three or more
rungs higher up/lower down on the economic ladder}).

The median response for the number of economic rungs above the
participants’ own standing was +3 (i.e., there are three or more rungs
higher up on the economic ladder) and the median response for the
number of economic rungs below the participants’ own level was 2 (i.e.,
there are two more rungs lower down the economic ladder). Sixty-eight
participants (71\%) indicated that the economic ladder consists of six
or more rungs (including their own rung), 14 participants (15\%)
indicated that it consists of 5 rungs, 10 participants (11\%) indicated
that it consists of 4 rungs, and only a single participant (1\%)
indicated that it consists of 3 rungs. (2 participants — 2\% — indicated
that it consists of 2 rungs.) Of those participants who indicated that
they think of the economic ladder in terms of either tertiles or
quintiles, 93\% indicated that the economic ladder consists of 5 rungs
and only 7\% indicated that it consists of 3 rungs,
$\chi^2$(1) = 11.27, \textit{p }{\textless}
.001. These data make it clear that Americans tend not to think of the
distribution of income in terms of three categories, lending credence
to our contention that forcing them to do so — that is, asking them to
estimate mobility in terms that depart from their natural way of
thinking — can yield responses that don’t align with their underlying
beliefs.\footnote{ If anything, these results suggest that people think
of the economic ladder as consisting of more than 5 rungs, not fewer.
Assuming that people believe it is easier to move up a ladder with
more rungs than one with fewer rungs, these results also suggest that
the 5-rung measure of perceived economic mobility may
\textit{underestimate} people’s beliefs about the likelihood of
climbing the economic ladder.} 

\section{Why does it matter how psychologists study perceptions of
  inequality and economic mobility?}

Why does asking about mobility in terms of quintiles versus tertiles
affect people’s estimates of the likelihood of rising up the economic
ladder? More specifically, why do people overestimate upward mobility
when thinking about society in terms of 5-rungs (Davidai \& Gilovich,
2015a; Kraus \& Tan, 2015; Kraus, 2015) but underestimate mobility when
thinking in terms of 3-rungs (Chambers et al., 2015)? Part of the
answer lies in the information implicitly conveyed by each research
method. When participants are asked to imagine American society as a
3-rung ladder, they may be implicitly prompted to think of
\textit{im}mobility rather than mobility. By segmenting society into
fewer groups — the “haves” versus the “have-nots,” or the “upper” versus
“middle” versus “lower” classes — researchers may inadvertently encourage
respondents to think of each economic group as a separate entity with
distinct and relatively impermeable boundaries (Campbell, 1958;
Hamilton \& Sherman, 1996). After all, segmenting society into three
groups affords people from the bottom rung only two options for
advancement, leading participants to think in terms of
\textit{im}mobility and the associated difficulties of moving up the
ladder. In contrast, the more groups society is segmented into — the
“super-rich,” the “upper class,” the “upper-middle class,” the “middle
class,” the “lower-middle class,” the “lower class,” the “working
poor,” and so forth — the more categories there are for people to rise up
into, and the easier it can seem for someone to move from one category
to the next.

To examine whether depicting society as a 3-rung ladder primes
participants to think less in terms of mobility and more in terms of
\textit{im}mobility, we surveyed 100 participants on Mechanical Turk
(54 females, M\textsubscript{age} = 36.16). As before, we asked
participants to think about society as a ladder people can move up or
down, and presented them with two images — one depicting a 3-rung ladder
and one depicting a 5-rung ladder. They were then asked to imagine a
randomly selected person born into a family at the bottom of the
ladder, and to indicate on which ladder, in their opinion, that
individual would be more likely to rise up to a higher rung. Thus,
rather than asking, as we did earlier, about how participants
spontaneously think about the economic ladder, we asked them to
consider both types of ladders and to indicate which one is more likely
to lead to upward mobility. 

As predicted, participants thought that a society segmented into five
groups provides more opportunity for upward mobility. Whereas 93
participants (93\%) thought that moving up a 5-rung ladder would be
easier, only 7 participants (7\%) thought that moving up a 3-rung
ladder would be easier, $\chi^2$(1) = 73.96,
\textit{p }{\textless} .0001. Thus, the fewer groups society is
segmented into, the more difficult it seems to move from one group to
the next. 

Beyond asking about movement across 3 vs.\ 5 groups, the procedures used
by Chambers at al., (2015) differed from those used by Davidai \&
Gilovich (2015a), Kraus \& Tan (2015), and Kraus (2015) in terms of
whether participants were likely to have been subtly focused on
immobility or mobility. People naturally think of movement in rankings
in terms of the likelihood of rising up the ladder, not the likelihood
of failing to do so (Davidai \& Gilovich, 2015b; 2016). Yet, the prompt
in Chambers et al.’s studies may have primed participants to think
about the difficulty of moving up the economic ladder by first
instructing them to consider what percentage of children born at the
bottom of the ladder “stayed in the bottom third of the income
distribution (i.e., lower class) like their parents,” and only then to
consider “what percentage of them moved up to the middle third (i.e.,
middle class)” and “to the top third (i.e., upper class).” In contrast,
participants in Davidai and Gilovich’s studies may have been subtly
primed with mobility by being asked to estimate the percentage of
Americans born into the bottom quintile who would rise up to the
highest quintile, next highest quintile, and so on. 

To examine the impact of this difference in question phrasing, we asked
204 participants from Mechanical Turk (121 females,
M\textsubscript{age} = 35.26) to estimate the likelihood of moving up a
5-rung ladder and manipulated whether their first estimate was the
percentage of Americans who would rise to the top quintile or the
percentage who would stay in the bottom. Specifically, participants
were asked to estimate the likelihood that a randomly chosen person
born into a family in the poorest 20\% of the population would, as an
adult, rise to each of the 4 higher income quintiles or remain in the
lowest quintile. Participants were randomly assigned to one of two
conditions. In the \textit{mobility focus }condition, participants
completed the study in the same order as in Davidai \& Gilovich
(2015a). They first estimated a person’s likelihood of rising up to the
top quintile and then estimated, in turn, the likelihood of rising to
the 2\textsuperscript{nd} richest quintile, the middle quintile, the
2\textsuperscript{nd} poorest quintile and, finally, the likelihood of
remaining in the bottom quintile. In the \textit{immobility focus}
condition\textit{, }we reversed this order. Participants first
estimated the likelihood that a person born to a family in the bottom
quintile would remain there as an adult, and subsequently estimated the
likelihood of rising up to the 2\textsuperscript{nd} poorest quintile,
the middle quintile, the 2\textsuperscript{nd} richest quintile, and
the richest quintile. 

As predicted, the order in which participants estimated the percentages
in each quintile significantly influenced their assessments of movement
along the income distribution. Whereas participants in the
\textit{mobility focus }condition indicated that the poorest 20\% of
the population have more than a 65\% chance of moving up the economic
ladder, participants in the \textit{immobility focus }condition
indicated that the poor have only a 57\% chance of doing so,
\textit{t}(202) = 2.74, \textit{p }= .007. 

\section{Convergent evidence using a new measure of beliefs about
  economic mobility }

The evidence presented thus far is entirely consistent with Swan et
al.’s (2017) contention that “\textit{big-picture conclusions}”
regarding economic mobility “\textit{can be swayed by subtle
item-wording confounds}.” But it is unclear whether, as they claim, the
psychological community would be better off not studying the accuracy
of people’s judgments. Indeed, when using research methods that reflect
how laypeople naturally think of the economic distribution, there is
substantial evidence that Americans underestimate economic inequality
and overestimate upward economic mobility (Davidai \& Gilovich, 2015a;
Kraus \& Tan, 2015; Norton \& Ariely, 2011). That message is reinforced
by the results of two studies we conducted using a new method in which
we compared participants’ beliefs about economic mobility in different
countries with actual cross-country levels of mobility. 

Specifically, we asked 101 Mechanical Turk participants (71 females,
M\textsubscript{age} = 35.02) to rank a list of 15 countries in terms
of economic mobility. Participants read the following: “Social
mobility refers to the likelihood that a person will be at a different
economic standing than his or her parents. When a country has high
economic mobility, a person’s standing is only minimally affected by
the economic standing they were born into. In contrast, when a country
has a low level of mobility, a person’s economic standing in life is
strongly determined by their parents’ economic standing.” Participants
were then presented, in random order, with a list of the following 15
countries, \textit{Peru, China, Brazil, Chile, United Kingdom, Italy,
  Argentina, United States, Switzerland, Pakistan, Singapore, France,
  Spain, Germany, }and \textit{New Zealand}, and were asked to “rank
these countries in terms of how mobile you believe each one is, from
the country with the highest social mobility (\#1) to the country with
the lowest social mobility (\#15).” We selected these countries
because the United States ranks exactly in the middle of this
group — 8\textsuperscript{th} out of 15 (Corak, 2013).\footnote{
  Although there is considerable debate about the best way to measure
  economic mobility, the most commonly used statistic is the index of
  \textit{intergenerational elasticity in earnings}. This index tracks
  how much of the relative difference in parental earnings is
  transmitted, on average, to their children. The index ranges from
  1.0 (complete lack of mobility – parents whose income differs by
  100\% will, on average, have children whose income, as adults, will
  also differ by 100\%) to 0 (complete mobility – parents whose income
  differs by 100\% will have children whose income, as adults, will
  not differ at all). For a more in-depth discussion of
  intergenerational mobility and the validity of cross-country
  comparisons, see Corack (2013). } Thus, participants had an equal
opportunity to under- or overestimate the actual ranking of the United
States. If, as argued by Swan et al.  (2017), beliefs about upward
mobility are “\textit{like constructed preferences},” there is no
a-priori reason to expect participants to systematically overestimate
or underestimate the United States’ ranking. In contrast, if Americans
tend to overestimate the degree of economic mobility in the
U.S. (Davidai \& Gilovich, 2015a), then participants should rank the
United States higher than its actual rank.

The results could not have been clearer. First, attesting to the
validity of this method of measuring beliefs about economic mobility,
we found that political ideology significantly predicted participants’
rankings, $\beta$ = 0.40, \textit{t}(99) = 4.26, \textit{p} {\textless}
.0001, with conservative participants (M = 1.41) estimating that the
United States ranks significantly higher than did liberal participants
(M = 3.78), \textit{t}(81) = 3.66, \textit{p }= .0004. More important,
although the United States is actually ranked 8\textsuperscript{th}
among the 15 listed countries, participants assigned it a mean rank of
2.81, one-sample \textit{t}(100) = 18.13, \textit{p }{\textless} .0001.
Ninety-one percent of the participants thought that the United States
ranks higher in terms of mobility than it actually does, 75\% thought
that it ranks in the Top 3 countries, and 53\% thought that the United
States is the most mobile of the 15 countries. Thus, using a novel (and
simple) method that sidesteps the 5-rung/3-rung ladder discussion, we
find converging evidence that Americans do indeed overestimate the
degree of economic mobility in the U.S.

We conducted a conceptual replication to examine the robustness of this
result and ensure that it was not due to something peculiar about the
other specific countries to which the U.S. was compared. In the first
survey, we chose the comparison countries as something of a strict test
of our hypothesis, making it equally possible for participants to over-
or under-estimate the relative level of mobility in the United States
(because the U.S. ranked in the middle of those countries in terms of
mobility). However, it is clear that many of the other countries in the
first survey differ significantly from the U.S. in form of governance,
level of industrialization, culture, and so on. We therefore asked
participants in a follow-up survey to rank the United States among a
group of highly industrialized, Western, democratic countries – the
seven members of the G7 forum. We also wanted to examine whether
participants’ overestimation of the degree of economic mobility in the
U.S. is not simply a reflection of a general tendency to see the U.S.
as “better” than other countries in general. Therefore, we also asked
participants to assess how the United States compares to other
countries in terms of economic \textit{inequality}. We predicted that
participants would overestimate how the U.S. ranks among G7 countries
in terms of mobility, but not in terms of inequality. 

One hundred five Mechanical Turk participants (53 females, 52 males,
M\textit{\textsubscript{age}} = 35.21) were presented with a list of
the seven countries in the G7 (\textit{United Kingdom, Italy, United
States, France, Japan, Germany, }and \textit{Canada}) and were randomly
assigned to rank them either in terms of economic mobility (“rank these
countries in term of how mobile you believe each one is, from the
country with the highest social mobility (\#1) to the country with the
lowest social mobility (\#7)” or economic inequality (“rank these
countries in terms of how unequal you believe each one is, from the
country with the highest income inequality (\#1) to the country with
the lowest income inequality (\#7)”). 

As before, participants overestimated how highly the United States ranks
in terms of economic mobility. Although the United States is actually
ranked 5\textsuperscript{th} in terms of economic mobility among the G7
countries, participants assigned it a mean rank of 2.45, one-sample
\textit{t}(52) = 9.20, \textit{p }{\textless} .0001. Eighty-one percent
of the participants thought that the United States ranks higher in
mobility than it actually does, 75\% thought that it ranks in the Top
3, and 55\% thought that the United States is the most economically
mobile country among the G7. 

Tellingly, participants’ beliefs about economic inequality revealed a
strikingly different pattern. Whereas 81\% of the participants
overestimated the United States’ rank in terms of economic mobility,
only 23\% overestimated its rank in terms of egalitarianism,
$\chi^2$(1) = 35.47, \textit{p }{\textless} .0001.
This asymmetry was even more striking when considering only those
participants who thought that the United States ranks at the top of
the G7 in terms of mobility or egalitarianism. Whereas 55\% of the
participants thought that the United States was the most economically
mobile country among the G7, only 8\% thought that is was the most
economically egalitarian country, $\chi^2$(1) =
26.93, \textit{p }{\textless} .0001. Thus, participants did not simply
see the United States as categorically “better”. Rather, such an
overly rosy view of the U.S. was restricted to economic mobility,
which participants significantly overestimated relative to other
highly developed, democratic countries.\footnote{ As an additional
  testament to the validity of this measure of perceived mobility, we
  again found that political ideology significantly predicted
  participants’ ranking.  The more conservative participants were, the
  higher they believed the United States ranked in terms of mobility
  among the G7 countries, $\beta$ = 0.30, \textit{t}(52) = 2.26,
  \textit{p} = .028. In contrast, and consistent with findings
  reported by Norton \& Ariely (2011), political ideology was
  unrelated to perceived economic inequality, $\beta$ = 0.14,
  \textit{t}(99) = 0.79 , \textit{ns.}}

\section{General discussion}

During every election cycle, political candidates and their respective
parties spend fortunes spinning stories to improve their chances of
being elected. A 2\% economic growth rate is hailed as a notable
success by incumbents but a marked failure by their opponents. A drop
in the stock market is described as a natural “correction” by one party
and an economic calamity by another. A six-fold gap between the top and
bottom quintiles is glorified as the fruits of meritocracy or vilified
as a reflection of rampant nepotism and cronyism. In forming such
narratives, politicians and their handlers are adhering to an age-old
rule of social psychology: People’s actions are guided not by how the
world is, but by how it seems. 

Given that construal drives decision making, it is important to
understand people’s beliefs about how wealth is distributed in the
United States above and beyond how it is actually distributed. Are
people’s assessments of the economic conditions in the U.S. accurate,
or are they systematically biased? A considerable amount of recent
research suggests the latter, with Americans vastly underestimating the
level of economic inequality (Norton \& Ariely, 2011) and
overestimating the degree of economic mobility (Davidai \& Gilovich,
2015a; Kraus \& Tan, 2015) in the United States. Americans believe they
live in a country that is significantly more equal and upwardly mobile
than it actually is. 

Not everyone agrees with that assessment. Eriksson \& Simpson
(2012) argue that the finding that Americans underestimate the amount
of inequality in the United States is the result of methodological
artifacts (but see Norton \& Ariely, 2013 for a response). Similarly,
using different methods than Davidai \& Gilovich (2015a) and Kraus \&
Tan (2015), Chambers and colleagues (2015) report that Americans tend
to \textit{under}estimate the degree of economic mobility in the U.S.
What should one conclude from the existing state of research on this
issue?

Swan et al.\ (2017) argue that these conflicting results indicate that
beliefs about economic mobility are fundamentally inconsistent and
that, as a consequence, examining population-level biases in
perceptions of mobility is a futile endeavor. We respectfully disagree.
Conflicting findings advance our science, pushing the research
community to hone its theories and improve its methods. Human beings
prefer a sure outcome to an uncertain gamble, except when they don’t — an
inconsistency that was part of the inspiration for Prospect Theory
(Kahneman \& Tversky, 1979). The presence of others facilitates
performance, except when it doesn’t — leading to a unified account of
social facilitation (Zajonc \& Sales, 1966). Unfortunate actions elicit
more regret than failures to act, except when they don’t — leading to a
better understanding of what people regret, and why (Gilovich \&
Medvec, 1995). By the same token, we see the conflicting conclusions
regarding judgments of mobility as a challenge, not an insurmountable
barrier, to reaching an accurate understanding of people’s beliefs
about the U.S. economy — one that can benefit both the scientific
community and economic policymakers. 

The inconsistency that has arisen in the study of perceptions of
mobility — that people appear to be overly optimistic or pessimistic
about economic mobility depending on how their beliefs are
measured — highlights the question of how assessments of mobility
\textit{should }be measured. What constraints should researchers take
into account when studying lay perceptions of mobility and inequality?
As we have shown, a number of theoretical considerations suggest that
these perceptions are best examined by dividing the distribution of
income into five groups rather than three (Davidai \& Gilovich, 2015a).
First, people spontaneously tend to think of the economic ladder as
consisting of five, not three, different rungs and so psychologists
interested in tapping the public’s actual views of society would be
well-advised to honor people’s existing mental models and frame their
questions accordingly. Second, people tend to think of mobility in
terms of the likelihood of moving up the ladder, not the likelihood of
failing to do so (Davidai \& Gilovich, 2015b, 2016), and questions
framed in terms of mobility tend to elicit responses that reflect a
greater faith in the American Dream than questions framed in terms of
immobility. Given that upward mobility is an inherent theme in the very
idea of the American Dream (Kluegel \& Smith, 1986), it is likely that
Americans’ thoughts about the economic ladder most often focus on
mobility, not immobility. (Although that of course can change if
mobility continues to decline and that fact gets reported more and
more.) 

This implies that the five-quintile conceptualization of society may be
specific to the United States, and research methods should be matched
to best reflect the target population’s mental models of their
respective society. Given that people in different countries may think
about their own society differently (e.g., in terms of tertiles,
quantiles, deciles, etc.), a one-size-fits-all approach for the study
of economic inequality and mobility may not be appropriate. That said,
some research methods may be a better fit across different contexts
than others. For example, building on the findings that both Americans
and Australians underestimate economic inequality in their respective
countries (Norton \& Ariely, 2011; Norton, Neal, Govan, Ariely \&
Holland, 2014), Kiatpongsan \& Norton (2014) measured people’s beliefs
about the ratio between the incomes of the top earners in their country
and the median earners. Across different countries, they found that
people substantially underestimate the CEO-to-median-worker ratio.
Similarly, in this paper we have shown — using a novel measure that does
not rely on the segmentation of society into distinct groups —  that
Americans overestimate economic mobility in the U.S. 

In addition to using measures that best tap into how people naturally
think about economic mobility, it would be useful from a pragmatic
perspective if those measures coincided with the measures used by
economists, who have by far the most impact when it comes to setting
policies regarding inequality and economic mobility. Do economists tend
to think of the distribution of income in terms of three groups or
five? To find out, we searched the National Bureau of Economic Research
working papers database (\href{../}{http://www.nber.org)} and found 100
papers that include the words “income \textit{quintile}” and 50 papers
that include the words “wealth \textit{quintile}.” In contrast, we
found only 3 papers that include the words “income \textit{tertile}” or
“wealth \textit{tertile}.” Similarly, a search for the words “income
quintile” on the Congressional Budget Office website (a non-partisan
federal agency that provides economic analysis to Congress;
https://www.cbo.gov) yields 86 reports and 4 working papers, whereas a
search for “income tertile” or “wealth tertile” did not yield any
reports or working papers. Given that economists in government and
academia think about the distribution of economic gains in terms of
five distinct groups rather than three, psychologists who wish to
contribute to the debate about mobility and inequality are likely to be
better served by doing so as well. Thus, from both theoretical and
pragmatic perspectives, researchers are likely to be better off
studying people’s perceptions of mobility in terms of movement across
five, not three, income groups.

More generally, rather than giving up on assessing the public’s beliefs
about economic inequality, we believe that genuine progress can be made
by employing methods that align with the pragmatic and theoretical
considerations we have outlined here. We hope that by digging deeper
into how lay people and experts think about economic mobility, research
on this topic might advance the evolution of best practices for
studying perceptions of inequality and mobility. Increased attention to
the impact of different methodological choices in this area should
advance our field’s understanding of lay beliefs about the functioning
of the economy and, in so doing, help psychologists gain a seat at a
table traditionally reserved for economists and political scientists. 

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\end{hangparas}
\end{document}
