A functional approach to the psychology of inequality

Inequality is a defining challenge of societies across history, and psychology research can support understanding of its persistence and impacts. In this Perspective, we advance scholarship by understanding inequality in terms of psychology’s function in producing structures of domination or promoting resistance to those structures, rather than situating inequality as caused by deficits in individual behaviour and psychology. We review scholarship on domination and resistance that highlights the utility of this functional lens, as well as its potential to advance understanding of inequality. We then provide four steps that researchers can take to study inequality from a functional lens: questioning causal assumptions of existing psychological models that focus on deficit-based mental states; studying impacts of inequality rather than intentions of actors in unequal settings; embracing immersive methods and practices that engage with the complexity of structural inequality; and applying research that uses cross-level analytic techniques to examine relationships between individual psychology and societal structures. Deficit-based models assume that inequality arises because of deficiencies among low-status individuals. In this Perspective, Kraus et al. propose a functional approach to inequality wherein psychological processes that arise from structural context promote actions that either support or dismantle structures of inequality.