Behaviours and their associated cognitive mechanisms do not exist in isolation, rather they are embedded in a world that is naturally social, and rich in context. Using a joint version of Posner’s spatial cueing paradigm, I demonstrate how high-level beliefs about situational contexts modulate automatic orienting of attention. In these tasks, participants see cues and detect targets at same or different locations, while interacting with an unseen partner. Crucially, they are led to believe that the cues represent the gaze location of their partner, a social cue that we have found generates larger inhibition of return (IOR) effects compared to when they believe the cues are computer generated. In this current study, we further situated participants and their unseen partner in a fictional society that either exhibited high or low social inequality. Interestingly, we found that this high-level situational context modulated socially cued IOR effects such that they were reduced in the high inequality compared to low inequality context. I interpret this result in line with our previous work showing reduced socially cued IOR in low cooperative interactions. I then propose this as initial evidence for how social environments play an important role in scaffolding automatic patterns of visual attention, and how in certain joint contexts this may be beneficial in constraining our bias for novelty.