Unequal Foundations

"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