ABSTRACT
The rich and the poor personify economic inequality. Whereas the concept of distributive justice applied to society as a whole is quite abstract, the rich and poor in a given society are quite real and quite visible. The split-consciousness perspective proposes that beliefs about social inequality are formed by two broad influences. First, they are the product of inculcation of dominant-ideology beliefs. Second, beliefs are the product of everyday, stratification-related experience. An influential perspective on the macro level determination of stratification beliefs has been labeled the "dominant ideology thesis" — as summarized by Abercrombie, Hill, and Turner. The thesis argues that in all societies based on class divisions there is a dominant class which enjoys control of both the means of material production and the means of mental production. Values in the one-factor column test the strongest version of the "unitary" view that people think of poverty and wealth along the same continuum.
