Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://hdl.handle.net/1893/36388
Appears in Collections:Economics Journal Articles
Peer Review Status: Refereed
Title: Why are socioeconomic health inequalities unacceptable? Studying the influence of explanatory framings on cognitive appraisals
Author(s): Bridger, Emma K.
Tufte‐Hewett, Angela
Comerford, David
Nettle, Daniel
Contact Email: david.comerford@stir.ac.uk
Keywords: explanatory framings
lay perceptions
socioeconomic health inequalities
Issue Date: 29-Jul-2024
Date Deposited: 16-Oct-2024
Citation: Bridger EK, Tufte‐Hewett A, Comerford D & Nettle D (2024) Why are socioeconomic health inequalities unacceptable? Studying the influence of explanatory framings on cognitive appraisals. <i>Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy</i>. https://doi.org/10.1111/asap.12415
Abstract: 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.
DOI Link: 10.1111/asap.12415
Rights: © 2024 The Author(s). Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Licence URL(s): http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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