Jonathan Mijs new award and ASA op-ed
A paper by Professor Jonathan Mijs has won the International Society for Justice Research Morton Deutsch Award for best article published in Social Justice Research in 2022.
Please find below the jury report and the full paper here: “Deliberating Inequality: A Blueprint for Studying the Social Formation of Beliefs about Economic Inequality”
“The extent of economic inequality is frequently underestimated and may result in lower support for taxation and redistribution. This article reports on deliberative forums to scrutinize the interactional context in which people process and use information to form beliefs about economic inequality. By using an innovative approach, the paper adds new insights to the debate about the formation of distributional attitudes, how information about wealth and income inequality via discussion and interaction networks may change people’s understanding of inequality. This study is part of a wider planned research design, a blueprint, which was put on hold due to public Covid-19 pandemic restrictions.”
– Kjell Törnblom & Ali Kazemi, Editors-in-Chief, Social Justice Research
And today, Jonathan published an op-ed on the ASA Work-in-Progress blog: “Learning about inequality in unequal america” where he writes that sociologists are beginning to address the question “How do we learn about the lives of others?” by describing how people make sense of inequality: “Understanding how we perceive and explain inequality is important because our beliefs, in turn, are predictive of a host of political attitudes on topics ranging from healthcare to redistribution and the welfare state.”