Why do people so frequently disagree in their moral judgments? At least one reason, a new study shows, can be traced back to differences in material wealth.
People with lower income tend to make harsher moral judgments, according to research published online January 18 in Psychological Science.
The researchers, Marko Pitesa and Stefan Thau, hypothesized that people who lacked material resources would feel more threatened by antisocial behaviors like stealing because of their relatively more vulnerable situation. A high-income individual will have an easier time replacing a stolen object than a low-income individual, they observed. Likewise, a high-income victim of an violent crime will encounter less difficulties when obtaining medical care and taking time off work to recover.
“People who lack material resources are thus, on average, more vulnerable to the effects of others’ harmful behaviors,” the researchers explained in their study. “If this is so, then it is possible that a lack of material resources leads to harsher moral judgments of such behaviors.”
Pitesa and Thau conducted two studies to test their hypothesis.
The first study analyzed data from 85,475 individuals who participated in the international World Values Survey. The data from large cross-cultural survey showed that people with lower incomes were less likely than their wealthier counterparts to view harmful behaviors as justifiable. The harmful behaviors included lying, avoiding a fare on public transport, cheating on taxes, accepting a bribe, joyriding, driving under influence of alcohol, buying stolen goods, and fighting with the police.
In the second study, 203 individuals participated in a short experiment designed to manipulate whether or not they perceived that they lacked material resources. The participants were asked the approximate amount of money they earned in a month. Some participants indicated their monthly income on a scale skewed towards higher incomes — forcing them to report their income on the lower end of the scale — while other participants indicated their monthly income on a scale skewed towards lower incomes.
The participants then read and evaluated five scenarios that described people engaging in either harmful or nonharmful transgressions. The harmful scenarios involved hitting a man in the face with a steak, human sacrifice, throwing raw meat at a passerby, punching a prime minister in the face, and grabbing a woman’s buttocks without her consent. In the nonharmful versions of the scenarios, a man eats his steak with his hands, a human who died of natural causes was consumed by a relative, raw meat is used to masturbate, a prime minister is addressed informally, and a man passionately kisses and caresses his girlfriend to the discomfort of those around him.
Confirming their hypothesis, the researchers found those primed to feel less wealthy were more likely to judge the harmful scenarios as wrong or unacceptable. Those primed to feel less wealthy, however, were not more or less likely to judge the nonharmful scenarios as wrong.
“Considering the ubiquity of differences in the availability of material resources, we have identified a widespread factor that explains moral judgments. Our work also has indirect implications for the psychological and sociological study of broader phenomena such as judicial outcomes, political disagreement, and social conflict, which are affected by differences in moral judgment,” Pitesa and Thau wrote.