Income Inequality Depresses Support for Higher Minimum Wages

The minimum wage can be an effective policy tool for mitigating economic inequality, but public demand for higher minimum wages has not kept up with rising levels of income disparities. In our first study using protest attendance data over a six-and-a-half-year period in the United States (N = 130,562), we find evidence that higher economic inequality was associated with fewer and less well attended protests targeted at changing economic conditions and raising minimum wages. We corroborate this finding across eight laboratory experiments (N = 7,286)—including a U.S. nationally representative sample—finding causal evidence that higher levels of income inequality decrease support for higher minimum wages. We propose that this decreased support results from a psychological tendency to engage in ‘is-to-ought’ reasoning, where people use information about how much people actually earn to determine how much they should earn. We conclude by introducing an intervention to mitigate the effects of this phenomenon and discuss implications for policy communication.