Income inequality and status anxiety

The meet-up with the Lausanne Social Psychology Lab (UNILaPS) has been not only a very useful and enriching encounter, but also a pleasant and reinforcing experience. Having the opportunity to receive the attention and feedback from a large group of experts gives you a boost of motivation for continuing and improving your research.

After I had the opportunity to present a summary of my thesis during 45 minutes (very flexible about the timing), the host and other researchers in the audience, whose works are an important reference in my research, participated with enthusiasm in the subsequent debate. The debate and the interventions of many of the researchers—senior, postdocs and PhD students—helped me consider important aspects of the topic of my thesis and provided a fresh vision on new possible avenues for my research.

A few examples are some thoughts and questions about the nature of the relationship between some core variable in my thesis, like mobility beliefs, perceived inequality, status anxiety, socioeconomic status, and role of these variables on some important health and behavioural outcomes and on collective action.

Finally, I had the opportunity to have a more informal chat with Fabrizio Butera and continue discussing some implications of the main findings of my thesis, the questions raised by the audience, and the future avenues of my research. All this feedback will provide me with the opportunity to improve and enrich my research, but also improve the quality of one of the manuscripts presented and the dissertation of my thesis.

I would like to express my gratitude to the EASP for organizing this enriching event and especially to UNILaPS and Fabrizio for being so generous with their time and showing enthusiasm for such an initiative.