Income Gap, Materialism, and Attitude toward the Rich in Developing Countries

Abstract

The rich people are usually the target of the public’s attention. Every year Forbes’ list of the World’s richest people gets millions of clicks on the Internet. The wealthy “heroes” become as popular as movie or sport stars. Though many ordinary people admire the rich, they also do not hesitate to send out harsh critiques. In the United States, for example, Dittmar (1992) found that people hold mixed feelings toward the rich, entailing both respect and dislike. Although people may regard the rich as successful and smart, they may also see them as arrogant, presumptuous, coldhearted, greedy, and hypocritical. We thought the mixed feelings may be very common in many modernized Western societies. The freedom of speech and media portrayals of the rich may contribute to the public’s relatively less biased evaluation of the rich, because both the philanthropic, prosocial behaviors of the rich as well as the business scandals and inappropriately lavish lifestyles of the rich can be seen. As a result, it is hard for the vast majority to take an extreme evaluation of the rich elite. To the best of our knowledge, the issue of negative feelings toward the rich class has not become a serious problem in many industrialized countries