Information on income concentration and redistribution preferences: The case of the top 1% in the United States

Abstract

In recent decades, income inequality has soared in the United States, but few studies utilize experimental methodologies to assess whether having reliable information on income concentration affects the formation of redistribution attitudes. We advance this emerging literature through an analysis of information on the income owned by the top 1% of the income distribution – a group that is socio-politically meaningful and axial to the recent rise of inequality. The empirical evidence draws on a novel split-sample survey experiment ( N = 4,000). The results indicate that having the real value of income concentration does not have an average, significant effect on redistribution attitudes. Neither does it moderate the positive association between prior perceptions of concentration and these attitudes. However, the analysis suggests that intense cognitive effort is related to preference revision. This is because, information reduces pro-redistribution attitudes among extreme overestimators who process the information more intensely.