Fair Shares and Selective Attention

Attitudes toward fairness and redistribution differ along socioeconomic lines. To understand their formation, we conduct a large-scale experiment on attention to merit and luck and the effect of attention on fairness decisions. Randomly advantaged subjects pay less attention to information about true merit and retain more economic surplus, and this effect persists in subsequent impartial decisions. Attention also has a causal role: encouraging subjects to look at merit reduces the effect of an advantaged position on allocations. This suggests that attention-based policy interventions may be effective in reducing polarized views on inequality.