Die Unterstützung der Umverteilung durch die Linke beruht eher auf wahrgenommener Ungerechtigkeit als auf böswilligem Neid

>A new [study](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41506746/) published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin suggests that public support for wealth redistribution is driven by beliefs about fairness rather than jealousy toward the rich. The findings indicate that people who favor taxing the wealthy are primarily motivated by the perception that extreme wealth is not strictly earned through hard work. This research provides evidence that the popular “politics of envy” narrative, which claims left-leaning individuals just want to punish the successful, is largely inaccurate.

>Critics often dismiss support for economic redistribution as being fueled by malicious envy, which is a hostile and painful desire to see superior or wealthy individuals lose their advantages. This idea suggests that left-leaning individuals favor redistributive policies simply out of resentment for those who have achieved financial success.

>However, previous empirical links between left-wing political views and envy have been inconsistent and weak. The scientists suspected that past discussions overlooked a major psychological mechanism known as meritocracy beliefs. Meritocracy is the belief that social systems are generally fair, providing equal opportunities to all, and that financial success is the direct result of individual talent and hard work.

>“A popular argument against redistribution is that its supporters are driven by an immoral motive: envy. And indeed, some studies have found that envy predicts support for redistribution,” said study author Jasper Neerdaels, a postdoctoral researcher at KU Leuven in Belgium.

>“However, in our studies, we observed that this effect largely disappears once we took meritocracy beliefs into account, that is, whether people believe wealth and success are truly deserved. Thus, it seemed that support for redistribution is driven not by envy, but by the belief that the rich often don’t deserve their advantage. This is what we tested and found across four studies.”

The perpetual insecurity that drives excessive accumulation, looks at challenges from the have not majority as jealousy….well, obviously

The left needs decades of peer reviewed studies to prove the smallest point…

Which the right quickly dismisses with a meme they stole from Facebook that someone made with ai.

I’m glad the evidence backs up the obvious, but did we really need a scientific study for people to grasp this? Apparently so.

I don’t see wealth redistribution as primarily about either fairness or envy.

I’m largely about what works in society. Concentration of wealth ends up with a world where money gets used to oppress people. Societies with less extreme concentration have less need for law enforcement and punishment of criminals. The costs of poverty are paid by everyone.

Because *looks around* working hard is not a perfect formula for wealth.

This is why math is so important. People can’t perceive this unfairness when the don’t understand or see it; education is the first step to greater change. Teach children to know better so that when they’re adults no arguement is necessary

I don’t think this is a useful study.

it’s interpretation is rather subjective.

right leaning people simply have a different view on what constitutes fair or unfair. in their mind it’s perfectly fair to take all the profits if you’re the owner of something.

so if somebody says to owner(the right leaning person), hey that’s not fair, some of that money should go to other people, they’re going to believe you’re envious because they don’t view your(the left learning persons) notion of ‚fair‘ as credible.

so the only thing that makes sense to them from their perspective is that your jealous of what they have.

„They’re just jealous haters.“ Well, no. As it turns out, exponential disparities in wealth mean equally exponential gaps in quality of life, influence in government, and functioning of society.

Next thing we’ll discover is that conservatives actually hated liberals due to malicious envy all along

> When looking at support for wealth redistribution, the belief that wealth is unearned was a strong, dominant predictor. Malicious envy did not significantly predict support for redistributive policies once these meritocracy beliefs were factored into the statistical models.

This feels like drawing an arbitrary line between „you don’t deserve what you have“ and „I want what you have“. They’re not as mutually exclusive as the paper seems to imply.

I feel politicians and/or ‚deep state‘ (whatever that is) exploit people by breaking down their personality types. It sounds like democrats and conservatives are influenced different ways (consistently across the board), so it’s easy to keep us at each other’s throats etc.

I’m not making a strong claim that the inverse is true but it’s wild that a pop-psych survey that relies on self-reported data is eaten up so uncritically even though it admits that, at best, it’s shown a correlation between envy and a general belief that systems that produce wealth inequality aren’t meritocratic.

“Because the survey data relies on correlational observations, it is difficult to definitively prove cause and effect in every instance. It remains possible that feelings of envy could sometimes influence how fair a person thinks the system is, rather than the lack of fairness causing the envy.”

The control is just showing that left-leaning people are less likely to support wealth redistribution if they’re told explicitly that a wealthy person worked hard for and deserved their wealth.

It would be like publishing an article that makes the strong claim that conservative opposition to redistribution stems from a belief in fairness rather than a hatred for the poor because you showed that, even though there’s a correlation between belief in a system’s meritocracy and hatred for poor people, conservatives are more likely to support redistribution when told explicitly that a wealthy person didn’t deserve their riches.