We’re excited to welcome Prof. Burak Sonmez from the Centre for Quantitative Social Science at UCL, who will lead a session exploring how framing inequality as merit-based or structurally created affects redistributive preferences.

Date: Tuesday, February 17, 2026
Time: 13:00 (CET)
Language: English
Room: 40.144 Universitat Pompeu Fabra - Campus de la Ciutadella 

Register to join online: https://upf-edu.zoom.us/meeting/register/WNFRwa1CRIGTmGRDQMy__g

Abstract:
Meritocratic beliefs are widely invoked to legitimate inequality, yet evidence remains mixed on how redistributive preferences respond to different types of inequality and their attribution to individual effort and structural constraints. I test these mechanisms using a large-scale digital lab-in-the-field experiment in an online labour platform. Participants engaged in a one-shot give-or-take redistribution game with peers who are either low performers or non-native English speakers. This design allows to identify the causal effects of performance versus structural attributions on redistributive preferences across advantaged, disadvantaged, and equal states. To formalise expectations, I develop an attribution-conditioned fairness model, which extends established frameworks of inequality aversion and desert-based fairness by making fairness weights endogenous to attributional cues. The model generates testable predictions, and the experimental evidence shows that redistribution declines when inequality is framed as merit-based and increases when framed as structural disadvantage in the advantaged inequality state.