Misperceiving inequality and its roots: cross-country evidence from Europe

We contribute to the growing evidence that inequality is often misperceived and that personal experience plays a more significant role than objective conditions in shaping beliefs and attitudes toward it. In this study, we examine whether people’s views about fairness and inequality align with empirical measures. Specifically, we compare individuals’ perceptions of the relative importance of various factors in determining success in life with objective estimates of how education, hard work, family wealth, and gender predict income inequality across 27 EU countries. We find little correlation between perceptions and reality. People tend to more accurately recognize the importance of education in contributing to inequality, while the role of family wealth and gender is more strongly perceived by those directly affected by it. Women, for instance, exhibit greater awareness of gender-based disparities, and individuals in disadvantaged economic conditions display perceptions that correspond more closely to the observed role of family wealth. In contrast, those who are employed, upwardly mobile, or financially stable tend to attribute outcomes more strongly to hard work. These distorted perceptions, in turn, shape attitudes toward redistribution: beliefs about the importance of hard work and the overall level of inequality of opportunity emerge as key predictors of support for redistributive policies.