Do egalitarians always help the disadvantaged more than the advantaged? Testing a value‐norm conflict hypothesis in Malaysia

Do egalitarians always express greater compassion toward the disadvantaged than toward the advantaged? A closer look at existing scholarship on the topic suggests that they likely do. Here, we investigated whether such tendency is also apparent within interdependent , high power distance cultures where the high‐status privilege prevails. Given the emphasis on harmony in social relations in interdependent cultures, we reasoned that egalitarians might experience a dissonance between their private equity values and a societal norm prescribing high‐status privilege, which we refer to as the value‐norm conflict . We therefore proposed and found evidence in Malaysia ( N  =   273) that egalitarians succumbed to the normative high‐status privilege in their culture: They displayed greater compassion towards higher than lower status victims, but only when the political cost of doing so was low . Interestingly, anti‐egalitarians displayed equitable levels of compassion for high‐ and low‐status victims, but only when the political cost for taking such action also was low . Hence, we show that even egalitarians can, at times, favor the privileged and that anti‐egalitarians can act equitably, so long as the political cost of doing so is trivial for them.