University of Leicester
Browse

Why are socioeconomic health inequalities unacceptable? Studying the influence of explanatory framings on cognitive appraisals

Download (1.2 MB)
journal contribution
posted on 2024-08-01, 13:30 authored by Emma Bridger, Angela Tufte-Hewett, David Comerford, Daniel Nettle

Studies of aversion to health inequality have found that this is often greater when health outcomes are presented as varying with socioeconomic conditions. We sought to understand better why this is by studying the cognitive appraisals made about health inequality when presented with distinct explanatory framings. Across two pre-registered studies (N = 1321), UK and US participants judged the acceptability of life expectancy differences attributed to distinct framings: income, education, social class, neighborhood, lifestyle choices, and genetics. Health inequality was least acceptable when attributed to the four socioeconomic framings, and most acceptable for lifestyle choices and genetics. Six appraisal dimensions—complexity, malleability, inevitability, and extent driven by biological, psychological, and sociocultural causes—varied with framing and predicted views on health inequality. These dimensions could explain most of the drop in acceptability for health inequality attributed to socioeconomic factors relative to a condition with no framing. This work illustrates for the first time the cognitive appraisals and causal intuitions that link different explanatory framings to views on health inequality. These framings are viewed as least acceptable because they reduce the perceived involvement of biological causes while increasing the perception that sociocultural and psychological factors contribute to health inequality.

Funding

British Academy

Leverhulme Trust

History

Author affiliation

College of Life Sciences Psychology & Vision Sciences

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Published in

Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy

Publisher

Wiley

issn

1529-7489

eissn

1530-2415

Copyright date

2024

Available date

2024-08-01

Language

en

Deposited by

Dr Emma Bridger

Deposit date

2024-07-30

Usage metrics

    University of Leicester Publications

    Licence

    Exports

    RefWorks
    BibTeX
    Ref. manager
    Endnote
    DataCite
    NLM
    DC