Unequal Foundations

Inequality, Morality, and Emotions across Cultures

By: Steven Hitlin, Sarah K. Harkness

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Hardcover | 15 December 2017

At a Glance

Hardcover
240 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
23.39 x 15.6 x 1.42

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Unequal Foundations offers readers a novel theory and a unique use of cross-cultural data to assert that the level of economic inequality in a society is reflected in the emotional experience of its members. People living in societies with more equality (countries such as Japan, Germany, and Canada) generally experience more positive, binding emotions on a regular basis. On the other hand, those living in unequal societies (the United States and China, for example) are significantly more likely to regularly experience negative, sanctioning moral emotions. In this book, authors Steven Hitlin and Sarah K. Harkness explore the idea that morality operates at both the societal and individual levels, and contend that individual moral emotions represent the distal structure of society.

In addition to developing this broad theory ranging from society to the individual, Hitlin and Harkness offer their readers a novel use of data from a tool drawn from the affect control theory tradition in order to demonstrate empirical support for this theory. As such, the authors delve deeper than previous literature by presenting data that supports their general approach using a method designed for cross-cultural comparative research.

Industry Reviews

"Unequal Foundations is a provocative book that suggests that income inequality induces harsher moral judgments and neg-ative moral emotions and plays a more critical role in moral judgments and emotion than the cultural syndrome of individualism collectivism." -- Shigehiro Oishi, American Journal of Sociology "Social psychologists Hitlin and Harkness believe that moral emotions are embedded in the language of different societies. They believe that 'in societies that have greater economic inequality, the sanctioning-based moral emotions of anger, contempt, disgust, shame will be more frequent and severe.' To test this, they compare the US, Canada, Germany, Japan, and China...They found that the US and China, the two most unequal societies in this set, were similar, and the other three, which are more equal, grouped together. How one evaluates this very interesting finding will depend on how one views their method. The authors wanted to study the moral emotions embedded in ordinary language, but knew that the equivalent word in different languages often carries a different moral weight. To account for this, they used preexisting dictionaries from each of these countries, in which students had given quantitative values on several different dimensions to various words...Recommended." --CHOICE

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