Resource possession in the mind's eye: ideological convergence and divergence in the perceptions of poor people

Social hierarchies ultimately concern resource possession, yet psychological processes for regulating resource-related tensions remain underexplored. We examine how support for intergroup equality (egalitarianism) relates to explicit attitudes toward, and mental images of, the resource poor. In Study 1 (N = 625), egalitarians report more favorable attitudes toward the resource poor than anti-egalitarians. However, using the reverse correlation paradigm, both groups generate similarly negative mental images of this group, as shown by pixel luminance comparisons (Study 1) and evaluated by independent raters of person-perceptual (Study 2, N = 394) and coalitional traits (Study 3, N = 348). While ideology did not shape image generation, it did influence image evaluation: egalitarian raters showed less polarization between resource-poor and resource-rich faces than anti-egalitarian raters. These findings suggest that despite ideological differences in explicit attitudes (divergence), egalitarians, and anti-egalitarians share similarly negative mental representations (convergence) of the resource poor, highlighting a nuanced interplay between social perception and hierarchy regulation.