A deep learning model identifies emphasis on hard work as an important predictor of income inequality.

ABSTRACT: High levels of income inequality can persist in society only if people accept the inequality as justified. To identify psychological predictors of people's tendency to justify inequality, we retrained a pre-existing deep learning model to predict the extent to which World Values Survey respondents believed that income inequality is necessary. A feature importance analysis revealed multiple items associated with the importance of hard work as top predictors. As an emphasis on hard work is a key component of the Protestant Work Ethic, we formulated the hypothesis that the PWE increases acceptance of inequality. A correlational study found that the more people endorsed PWE, the less disturbed they were about factual statistics about wealth equality in the US. Two experiments found that exposi

SUBMITTER: Sheetal A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9194778 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature