A desire for equality produces inequality in social hierarchies when people focus on categories of recipients rather than individuals.

When distributing resources, people often experience a conflict between two fundamental moral principles: The equality principle prescribes that all recipients receive the same, while the proportionality principle prescribes that allocations should be in proportion to the contribution of each recipient. We propose that if people consider recipient units of distributions in hierarchies as categories, rather than individuals, seeking categorical equality leads to individual inequality, because in most hierarchical groups there are fewer higher ranked (e.g., management) than lower ranked members (e.g., workers). Ten preregistered experiments conducted in the United States and China (N = 4,902) confirm this idea and show that participants who focus on categorical (vs. individual) recipients perceive unequal distributions as fairer (Experiment 1) and create more unequal distributions (Experiments 2a-2d), even when this reduces their own payoffs (Experiment 3). This effect occurs because when construing recipient units as categories (vs. individuals), people seek equality at a categorical level, without sufficiently correcting for differences in group size. Supporting this theoretical explanation, this effect is eliminated when thinking of individual-level equality (Experiments 4a-4b). Furthermore, this effect exists only when the higher ranked group is smaller sized, as is often the case in hierarchies (Experiment 5), and only when inequality is consistent with proportionality (Experiment 6). Combined, our results show that when people perceive a hierarchy in categorical (rather than individual) terms, this increases distributive inequality between its higher and lower ranked members. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).