Research into Attitudes to Inflation and Incomes Policy

This paper presents a brief review of research evidence dealing with the individual's perceptions of inflation and incomes policy which was collected by means of national sample surveys and which may be of interest to social economists. The implications of the findings for discussions of inflation and incomes policies are also examined. The evidence has been fully documented elsewhere. The research explored some of the social/psychological factors involved in attitudes to inflation which might account for their apparently intractable nature. This territory in the no‐man's area between economics and psychology seemed to have been neglected because the study of inflation was looked upon as primarily the domain of economists while the study of attitudes, learning and thought processes was considered to be that of psychologists.