Data and Code for: Fair Shares and Selective Attention

Attitudes towards fairness and redistribution differ along socio-economic lines. To under-<br>stand their formation, we conduct a large-scale experiment on attention to merit and luck<br>and the effect of attention on fairness decisions. Randomly advantaged subjects pay less<br>attention to information about true merit and retain more economic surplus, and this effect<br>persists in subsequent impartial decisions. Attention also has a causal role: encouraging<br>subjects to look at merit reduces the effect of an advantaged position on allocations. This<br>suggests that attention-based policy interventions may be effective in reducing polarized<br>views on inequality.