Factors Affecting the Allocation of Social Housing to People (Report‪)‬

One hundred and fifteen adults provided priority ratings for allocating social housing to 16 fictitious applicants. A four-way repeated measures design was used in which applicants differed on four variables: marital status (married or single), smoking habits (smoking or non-smoking), income (half or double the national average), and mental illness (history or no history of illness). There were two significant main effects with medium-to-large effect sizes. Poor applicants were given priority over their wealthy counterparts and applicants with a history of mental illness were preferred over applicants without mental illness. There were significant interactions between a) income and smoking and between b) history of mental illness and marital status. Although low-income applicants were consistently preferred over high-income applicants, the effect was somewhat stronger for non-smokers than for smokers. Similarly, although applicants with a history of mental illness were consistently given priority over their mentally healthy counterparts, the effect was somewhat stronger for the single than for the married. Participants' 'just world' beliefs had a limited influence on their allocation decisions: those with low 'just world' scores as well as those with high 'unjust world' scores tended to give somewhat higher priority ratings to mentally ill and low-income applicants. **********