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2 The Psychology of Inequity approaches have focused on how ancestors and the societies they lived in may have developed and selected for instincts that continue to inform modern-day behaviors. To this end, a growing body of studies has focused on the existence of both instincts toward dominance and those that pro- mote egalitarianism as dual evolutionary forces, each with its advantages and downsides, that may have differentially promoted survival. Finally, the individual also matters, and a substantive body of literature from personality psychology has highlighted crucial individual differ- ences related to social dominance and right-wing authoritarianism as cru- cial predictors of how a person responds to inequality. Of all the ways one person may differ inherently from another, these two constructs are the most readily tied to a variety of inequities, including racism, sexism, and support for systemic inequalities across a variety of national contexts (e.g., the caste system in India: Cotterill, Sidanius, Bhardwaj, & Kumar, 2014 the disenfranchisement of Blacks in South Africa: Duckitt & Farre, 1994). First, a broad overview of the classic social-psychological theories can inform our modern-day understanding of inequality, examining early theories surrounding self-fulfilling prophecy, stereotype threat, and self-stereotyping. Some of these have applications that extend beyond inequality (e.g., self-fulfilling prophecy), while others (e.g., those related to stereotyping) have always been more centrally focused on group inequali- ties. I then move on to explore the major motivational approaches that have been used to explain these processes, including those related to cognition (e.g., system justification, cognitive dissonance, cognitive miser theory), as well as those related to biological factors (dominance vs. counterdomi- nance instincts) and personality (e.g., social dominance orientation, right- wing authoritarianism). The chapter ends with a discussion of the future of inequality and some of the gaps that remain yet to be explored. THE ROLE OF SELF-FULFILLING PROPHECIES As a phenomenon, self-fulfilling prophecies have been widely studied from the social sciences and have been used to explain a host of phenom- ena, from economic crises (e.g., Azariadis, 1981) to educational disparities (Jussim, Robustelli, & Cain, 2009). In its original iteration, self-fulfilling prophecies were primarily studied in dyadic contexts where perceivers’ expectations about targets could lead those targets to fulfill those expecta- tions (for review, see Jones, 1977). In this form, self-fulfilling prophecies could be used to explain both general patterns of interaction among dyads (e.g., rejection sensitivity and subsequent rejection in close relationships: Downey, Freitas, Michaelis, & Khouri, 1998) and specific patterns of ste- reotype threat and fulfillment (e.g., for review, see Jussim, Palumbo, Chat- man, Madon, & Smith, 2000). Of particular interest to this chapter is the role self-fulfilling prophecies play in the maintenance of inequity. In this particular context, the idea is