Chronic frames of social inequality: How mainstream media frame race, gender, and wealth inequality

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2110712119

How social inequality is described—as advantage or disadvantage—critically shapes individuals’ responses to it [e.g., B. S. Lowery, R. M. Chow, J. R. Crosby, J. Exp. Soc. Psychol. 45, 375–378, 2009]. As such, it is important to document how people, in fact, choose to describe inequality.

In a corpus of 18,349 newspaper articles (study 1), in 764 hand-coded news media publications (study 2), and in a preregistered experiment of 566 lay participants (study 3), we document the presence of chronic frames of race, gender, and wealth inequality.

Specifically, race and gender inequalities are more likely to be framed as subordinate groups’ disadvantages than as dominant groups’ advantages, and wealth inequality is more likely to be described with no frame (followed by dominant group advantage, then subordinate group disadvantage).

Supplemental lexicon-based text analyses in studies 1 and 2, survey results in study 3, and a preregistered experiment (study 4; N = 578) provide evidence that the differences in chronic frames are related to the perceived legitimacy of the inequality, with race and gender inequalities perceived as less legitimate than wealth inequality.

The presence of such chronic frames and their association with perceived legitimacy may be mechanisms underlying the systematic inattention to White individuals’ and men’s advantages, and the disadvantages of the working class.

Inequality frames are also powerful because they impact how individuals prefer to address inequality. For example, Lowery et al. and others (6, 9) have found that exposure to the White advantage frame (as opposed to the minority disadvantage frame) decreases White individuals’ opposition to redistributive policies that are explicitly understood to reduce their position but does not affect White individuals’ opposition to the same policies when they are framed as helping minority Americans’ positions. This is because reducing the dominant group’s position restores justice to an unequal system involving dominant-group advantage, whereas reducing the dominant group’s position is not effective at restoring justice to an unequal system involving subordinate-group disadvantage (2, 9).