High economic inequality is linked to greater moralization

Kelly Kirkland (), Paul van Lange, Drew Gorenz, Khandis Blake, Catherine Amiot, Liisi Ausmees, Peter Baguma, Oumar Barry, Maja Becker (), Michal Bilewicz, Watcharaporn Boonyasiriwat, Robert Booth, Thomas Castelain, Giulio Costantini, Girts Dimdins, Agustín Espinosa, Gillian Finchilescu, Ronald Fischer, Malte Friese, Ángel Gómez, Roberto González, Nobuhiko Goto, Peter Halama, Camilo Hurtado-Parrado, Ruby Ilustrisimo, Gabriela Jiga-Boy, Peter Kuppens, Steve Loughnan, Khairul Mastor, Neil Mclatchie, Lindsay Novak, Blessing Onyekachi, Muhammad Rizwan, Mark Schaller, Eleonora Serafimovska, Eunkook Suh, William Swann, Eddie Tong, Ana Torres, Rhiannon Turner, Christin-Melanie Vauclair, Alexander Vinogradov, Zhechen Wang, Victoria Wai Lan Yeung and Brock Bastian
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Maja Becker: CLLE - Cognition, langues, langage, ergonomie - EPHE - École Pratique des Hautes Études - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres - UT2J - Université Toulouse - Jean Jaurès - UT - Université de Toulouse - UBM - Université Bordeaux Montaigne - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - TMBI - Toulouse Mind & Brain Institut - UT2J - Université Toulouse - Jean Jaurès - UT - Université de Toulouse - UT3 - Université Toulouse III - Paul Sabatier - UT - Université de Toulouse

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Abstract: Throughout the 21st century, economic inequality is predicted to increase as we face new challenges, from changes in the technological landscape to the growing climate crisis. It is crucial we understand how these changes in inequality may affect how people think and behave. We propose that economic inequality threatens the social fabric of society, in turn increasing moralization—that is, the greater tendency to employ or emphasize morality in everyday life—as an attempt to restore order and control. Using longitudinal data from X, formerly known as Twitter, our first study demonstrates that high economic inequality is associated with greater use of moral language online (e.g. the use of words such as "disgust", "hurt", and "respect'). Study 2 then examined data from 41 regions around the world, generally showing that higher inequality has a small association with harsher moral judgments of people's everyday actions. Together these findings demonstrate that economic inequality is linked to the tendency to see the world through a moral lens.

Keywords: moralization; economic inequality; anomie; moral judgments; Twitter (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-04670509v1
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Published in PNAS Nexus, 2024, 3 (7), pgae221. ⟨10.1093/pnasnexus/pgae221⟩

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-04670509

DOI: 10.1093/pnasnexus/pgae221

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