Remind Me of What I Have: Thinking about a Favorite Possession Mitigates the Negative Impact of Inequality on Subjective Well-being

Income inequality negatively impacts people’s subjective well-being, social relationships, and health (e.g. Alesina et al. 2004; Oishi et al. 2011; Oshio and Kobayashi 2010). Different mechanisms underlie these negative effects, for example, inequality lowers trust and perceived fairness of a society, which in turn reduce happiness (Oishi et al. 2011). Many governments redistribute income with the attempts to reduce inequality (Alesina et al. 2004). While these efforts are crucial for societies, they often require changes in public policies and economic structures that are beyond individuals’ reach, and their effects take time to unfold. Thus, it is important to seek out strategies that individuals can adopt to protect themselves from the impact of income inequality. To this end, we examine how reminding people about their possessions may play a role. The key insight of our findings is that reminding people of a single best possession, rather than a larger number of possessions, that they own can mitigate the negative impact of income inequality on subjective well-being. Income inequality has been shown to increase conspicuous consumption because people want to reduce the gap between what they have and what others have (Christen and Morgan 2005; Jaikumar and Sarin 2015; cf. Ordabayeva and Chandon 2010). However, how these acquired consumptions in turn influence well-being at a given level of income inequality is unclear. On one hand, research generally finds that material possessions, compared to other resources such as time (Mogilner 2010) or experiences (Gilovich et al. 2015), have a relatively weak impact on subjective well-being and happiness. On the other hand, material possessions have also been shown to successfully compensate people from threats and aversions (Gao et al. 2009; Reimann et al. 2017). Thus, we explore when material possessions can be used to mitigate the negative impact of income inequality on subjective well-being.