First, Nicolas Sommet clarifies that the basic psychological processes triggered by economic inequality are not inherently harmful: economic status salience is not necessarily aversive, social comparison can be contrastive or assimilative, and competition can be experienced as threatening or mobilizing.

Second, he synthesizes recent meta-analyses and large-scale longitudinal studies showing that economic inequality often has null, small, or contingent associations with outcomes typically assumed to worsen under inequality, including subjective well-being, mental health, physical health, crime, trust, and prosocial behavior.

Third, he shows that economic inequality more reliably predicts behaviors and preferences directly tied to economic status, including longer working hours, conspicuous consumption, and economic risk-taking.

Discussant will be dr. Eddie Brummelman, Associate Professor at the Research Institute of Child Development and Education, University of Amsterdam.

About the speaker

Nicolas Sommet is an ERC-funded Assistant Professor at the Institute of Psychology and Head of Research at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. His research examines the psychological consequences of economic inequality, achievement motivation, and statistical methods. He has received an ERC Consolidator Grant (2026–2031) to study how income inequality reproduces itself by shaping school culture, an SNSF Ambizione grant (2020–2024) to examine whether living in places with high income inequality predicts well-being, and an SNSF Spark grant (2019), which he co-received, to conduct a large-scale cross-national replication of the psychological effects of social class. He is also an Associate Editor at the European Journal of Social Psychology and a member of the Executive Committee of ADRIPS.