N. Derek Brown

Nine preregistered studies ( n = 4197) demonstrate that advantaged group members misperceive equality as necessarily harming their access to resources and inequality as necessarily benefitting them. Only when equality is increased within their ingroup, instead of between groups, do advantaged group members accurately perceive it as unharmful. Misperceptions persist when equality-enhancing policies offer broad benefits to society or when resources, and resource access, are unlimited. A longitudinal survey of the 2020 U.S. voters reveals that harm perceptions predict voting against actual equality-enhancing policies, more so than voters’ political and egalitarian beliefs. Finally two novel-groups experiments reveal that advantaged participants’ harm misperceptions predict voting for inequality-enhancing policies that financially hurt them and against equality-enhancing policies that financially benefit them. Misperceptions persist even after an intervention to improve decision-making. This misperception that equality is necessarily zero-sum may explain why inequality prevails even as it incurs societal costs that harm everyone.

Although White Americans increasingly express egalitarian views, how they express egalitarianism may reveal inegalitarian tendencies and sow mistrust with Black Americans. In the present experiments, Black perceivers inferred likability (Experiments 1-2), allyship (Experiment 1a), and trustworthiness (Experiments 1b-2), and accurately inferred underlying racial attitudes and motivations from White writers’ declarations that they are nonprejudiced and egalitarian (Experiments 1 and 2). White writers believed that their egalitarianism seemed more inoffensive than was perceived by Black Americans (Experiment 1a). Linguistic analysis revealed that, when inferring racial attitudes and motivations, Black perceivers accurately attended to language emphasizing humanization, support for equal opportunity, personal responsibility, and the idea that equality already exists (Experiment 1b). We found causal evidence that these linguistic cues informed Black Americans’ perceptions of White egalitarians (Experiment 2). Suggesting societal costs of these perceptions, White egalitarians’ underlying racial beliefs negatively predicted Black participants’ actual trust and cooperation in an economic game (Experiment 3). Our experiments ( N = 1,335 adults) showed that White Americans’ insistence that they are egalitarian itself perpetuates mistrust with Black Americans.