“Trading places”: Do individual status changes reduce misattributions of poverty?

When explaining the sources of poverty, lay people tend to overestimate individual factors (e.g., lack of effort) while underestimating structural factors (e.g., racial discrimination). This tendency is especially pronounced among members of higher income classes. As overcoming poverty needs support from these groups, an inevitable question that arises is how misattributions of poverty can be corrected. Here, we investigate self-experience as a key variable that could help to correct attributional bias. We present data of a pilot study (N = 222 US Americans), in which participants either ended up as losers or winners or pure observers within an online game. In line with our expectations, losers of the game perceived the game as less fair, attributed the outcome of another player’s failure more to external than to internal factors, and supported the introduction of social game policies to a higher extent than winners. Based on these findings, in two further studies we aim to additionally test how individual status changes in a repeated measurement design, i.e., changing from the loser to the winner position and vice versa, affect participants’ perceived game fairness, attributions of another player’s failure and real-life poverty, and support for social game policies.