Merrell, Wilson N., Fan, Lei, Sheehy-Skeffington, Jennifer 
ORCID: 0000-0003-0372-4867 and Thomsen, Lotte
(2025)
Resource possession in the mind's eye: ideological convergence and divergence in the perceptions of poor people.
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.
ISSN 0146-1672
Abstract
Social hierarchies ultimately concern resource possession, yet psychological processes for regulating resource-related tensions remain underexplored. We examine how support for intergroup equality (egalitarianism) relates to explicit attitudes toward, and mental images of, the resource poor. In Study 1 (N = 625), egalitarians report more favorable attitudes toward the resource poor than anti-egalitarians. However, using the reverse correlation paradigm, both groups generate similarly negative mental images of this group, as shown by pixel luminance comparisons (Study 1) and evaluated by independent raters of person-perceptual (Study 2, N = 394) and coalitional traits (Study 3, N = 348). While ideology did not shape image generation, it did influence image evaluation: egalitarian raters showed less polarization between resource-poor and resource-rich faces than anti-egalitarian raters. These findings suggest that despite ideological differences in explicit attitudes (divergence), egalitarians, and anti-egalitarians share similarly negative mental representations (convergence) of the resource poor, highlighting a nuanced interplay between social perception and hierarchy regulation.
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Additional Information: | © 2025 by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc |
| Divisions: | Psychological and Behavioural Science |
| Subjects: | H Social Sciences > HM Sociology B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BF Psychology |
| Date Deposited: | 11 Nov 2025 11:06 |
| Last Modified: | 13 Nov 2025 08:18 |
| URI: | http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/130099 |
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