Unequal Foundations

This book offers a novel theory and an original use of cross-cultural data to argue that the level of economic inequality in a society is reflected in the emotional experience of its members. People living in societies with greater equality experience more positive, binding emotions on a regular basis, while people living in unequal societies, like the United States, are significantly more likely to regularly experience negative, sanctioning moral emotions. We develop the idea that morality operates at both the societal and individual levels, and develop the thesis that individual moral emotions represent the distal structure of society. We bridge a number of areas in social science, including morality, inequality, social psychology, and the study of emotions. A good deal of work explains how being economically advantaged (or not) contributes to individual tastes, beliefs, values, and choices. Very little work links the extent of the advantages within a society to individual outcomes. We suggest that being advantaged in a relatively equal society leads to different experiences and shared cultures than being advantaged in a highly unequal society. We offer a novel use of established data from a tool drawn from the well-established Affect Control Theory tradition to demonstrate empirical support for our theory. As such, we go beyond previous work by showing data that supports our theory using a method that is designed for cross-cultural comparative research. We aim for this book to stimulate future work via different tools to test our theoretical argument.