In this reply, we reiterate the main point of our 2012 paper, which was that the measure of inequality used by Norton and Ariely (2011) was too difficult for it to yield meaningful results. We describe additional evidence for this conclusion, and we also challenge the conclusion that political...

A recent survey of inequality (Norton and Ariely, Perspectives on Psychological Science, 6, 9-12) asked respondents to indicate what percent of the nation's total wealth is---and should be---controlled by richer and poorer quintiles of the U.S. population. We show that such measures lead to...