If you’re a liberal, the answer might be more like this: Americans have been hoodwinked by conservative politicians and media outlets, and have come to view redistribution as a dirty word because they don’t recognize the ways it benefits them. This barrage of misinformation has led them to view any redistributive efforts as welfare that goes to somebody else, particularly to someone with a different color skin. (Paul Krugman has made a version of that argument.)

New research offers a bit more evidence on what may be occurring. It doesn’t disprove either the conventional liberal or conservative argument. But it does show some of the ways that Americans’ attitudes toward redistribution are more complex than either would suggest.

A National Bureau of Economic Research working paper by Jimmy Charité, Raymond Fisman and Ilyana Kuziemko tackled this with an online experiment in which a random sampling of Americans were asked what tax rate they thought appropriate for someone whose annual income had suddenly increased by $250,000 for reasons involving luck. The researchers asked the question twice. In one version, the income gain occurred in the current year; in the other, it happened five years ago. Surprisingly, the respondents favored a 1.7 percentage point higher tax rate if the person with the income gain had recently started earning the extra money than if the person had been earning it for five years. That may not sound like much, but it is more than half of the gap the same experiment showed between the tax rate favored by Obama voters and the rate favored by those who said they voted for Mitt Romney in 2012.

In other words, respondents favored less redistribution if they believed that the person had already grown accustomed to a higher income. The psychology seems to be something like this: Rich people who have been rich for a while have gotten used to their money, so it would be unfair to tax them heavily. But people who have just gotten rich have not become accustomed to higher levels of after-tax income, so it wouldn’t be as harmful to raise their taxes in the interest of greater equality.

Another working paper, from the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity by Vivekinan Ashok, Ms. Kuziemko and Ebonya Washington, looks at how thinking about redistribution has varied over time among groups. One of its more striking conclusions: The shift away from a belief in redistribution has been stronger among older Americans than any other age group.

Might this be explained by the elderly becoming more conservative in general, and therefore taking a more conservative view on this issue? Not really. The shift showed up even when the researchers controlled for views on hot-button social issues like abortion and gun control.

The researchers offer another way of making sense of the pattern: Older Americans benefit more directly than any other age group from the social safety net, specifically, Social Security and Medicare. The fact that American seniors already receive government-provided health care may make them view any talk of greater redistribution as taking away what they already have, the researchers suggest.