As Western nations are increasingly divided by socioeconomic fault lines, how do we learn about the lives of others? Scholarship documents correlates of inequality beliefs but lacks a theoretical framework for studying belief formation. This paper develops an “institutional inference” model describing how adolescents learn about inequality in racially and socioeconomically homogeneous or heterogeneous institutional contexts. The latter expose them to structural sources of inequality that they cannot see in the former. Testing theoretical expectations on ten panels of US college students (n = 141,597), I find that: (1) beliefs about meritocracy and racial inequality change substantially in college, (2) the direction of change is shaped by experiences with same-race or different-race roommates, (3) the impact of which is strongest on campuses that otherwise provide limited exposure to heterogeneity. The inferential process that links institutions to beliefs may help explain why Americans have not rallied against inequality: when growing inequality produces socioeconomically homogeneous settings, people cannot experience its full extent.

随着西方国家越来越多地被社会经济断层线所分裂，我们如何了解他人的生活？学术文件与不平等信念相关，但缺乏研究信念形成的理论框架。本文开发了一个“制度推理”模型，描述青少年如何在种族和社会经济上同质或异质的制度环境中了解不平等。后者使他们面临前者看不到的结构性不平等根源。测试十个美国大学生小组的理论期望（n = 141,597)，我发现：(1) 关于精英管理和种族不平等的信念在大学里发生了巨大变化，(2) 变化的方向是由同种族或异种族室友的经历所决定的，(3) 其中的影响在校园里最强，否则会提供有限的异质性。将制度与信仰联系起来的推理过程可能有助于解释为什么美国人没有团结起来反对不平等：当日益严重的不平等产生社会经济同质环境时，人们无法体验到它的全部范围。