WealthTalks is a research project on how everyday people talk about wealth inequality.

The public opposes stark inequalities in wealth, but people are often hesitant to support measures to narrow the gap between the haves and the have-nots. We believe that everyday conversations play a crucial role for how people think and feel about wealth and inequality.

In WealthTalks, we describe how people talk online and offline about the topic. We explore how characteristics of the conversation partners, the situation, and the larger social context influence the conversations. Finally, we test to what extent conversations can change people’s beliefs and attitudes.

Funded by the Volkswagen Foundation, we collect data in five countries: Botswana, Brazil, South Africa, Germany, and the US. Doing so, we combine perspectives from the Global South and North and from societies in which social inequality by race and ethnicity are more or less visible.

We draw on a mix of social scientific methods: We analyze discussions from Reddit, we organize deliberative focus groups, we initiate short conversations in public places, and we run online experiments. 

WealthTalks is a basic research project, yet we have a transformative ambition: We want to identify argumentative traps and dead ends that hinder people to properly discuss which levels of wealth inequality are acceptable in their society.