Psychological factors of anti-market sentiment

Arkadiusz Sieroń

Chapter 5 in Rationality, Psychology and Capitalism, 2026, pp 106-120 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: The enormous benefits of a market-based economy are generally well known by economists. After all, since the Industrial Revolution, millions of people have emerged from poverty and improved their standard of living. Thus, the question arises: why do so many people display anti-market sentiment? In this chapter, I point out three psychological factors as potential explanations. First, people can have tribal instincts, which enabled the small groups to function and survive in the past, but inappropriately apply them to the extended order of cooperation through markets. Second, from the logical point of view, poverty (i.e., that some people earn below the level that allows them to meet their basic needs) seems to be a more important social issue than income inequality (that some people earn less than others, which is merely a statistical relationship between the incomes of different people). Hence, it can be argued that egalitarianism can be actually motivated by envy. Third, the idea of spontaneous order is not only intellectually, but also emotionally challenging, as it requires faith in impersonal market forces, while people could be evolutionarily adapted to live in tribal groups with clear hierarchies and leaders. Thus, having the government in charge can offer a (false) sense of security and control. This chapter is the most speculative in this book, but it shows that the concept of biases can be used not only to argue against the free market and for government interventions, but also to argue that the anti-market sentiment can be a form of a bias itself.

Keywords: Anti-market Sentiment; Envy; Illusion of Control; Inequality; Spontaneous Order; Tribal Bias (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
ISBN: 9781035394005
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