Poverty Causes Harsher Moral Judgments

You might expect poor people to be more sympathetic toward criminals and other transgressors, since they experience some of the same economic and social stressors as the people they're judging. However, the present research finds low income people to be more harsh in their moral judgments. Two French psychologists, Marko Pitesa and Stefan Thau, propose an explanation for this result.

The authors suggest that people who lack financial resources feel more vulnerable to the potentially harmful behavior of others, since they are less able to cope with victimization. For example, in the case of theft, a poor person will have more difficulty replacing the stolen objects than a richer person. Their harsher moral judgments, then, can be seen as a self-protective response by which they hope to reduce the threat of their own victimization by punishing perpetrators severely. Notice this argument only applies to offenses that do real material harm to someone, but not to victimless actions.

Public Execution in Iran, 2013
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The hypothesis was tested in two studies. The first utilized data from over 85,000 residents of 56 countries participating in the World Values Survey. The respondents were asked to evaluate eight harmful behaviors, such as lying and cheating on taxes, on a scale from “1” (“never justifiable”) to “10” (“always justifiable”). The two measures of economic vulnerability were the participants' self-reported household income, and the rate of inflation in their country. The effects of five control variables were statistically eliminated: education, occupational status, subjective social class, religiosity and race.

Both economic variables had significant effects. Lower income people and people living in countries with high inflation were more negative in their judgments of people who misbehave. In addition, inflation only made a difference when the respondents were poor. The effect of inflation was only statistically significant for people whose incomes were in the bottom sixth of the income distribution.

Of course, these are all correlations, and uncontrolled variables could be responsible for them. What I like about this paper is that they followed up the survey with a controlled experiment. A representative sample of 203 Americans partcipated on the internet. The researchers subtly manipulated the participants' perception of their own wealth by having them indicate their monthly income on an 11-point scale. They varied the anchors on the scale. In the material-resources-lacking condition, “1” was labeled “$0-$1000” and “11” was labeled “over $500,000” (a month!). Obviously, most participants circled numbers near the low end. In the material-resources-not-lacking condition, the scale anchors were “$0-$50” and “over $500.” Most participants were at or near the high end of the scale.

Participants then read five scenarios of either harmful behaviors, i.e., assault, or victimless actions, i.e., masturbation, and rated how “wrong,” “blameworthy,” “inappropriate” and “unacceptable” they each were. The victimless actions were included to ensure that participants who felt economically deprived didn't simply become more negative toward all behaviors.

As expected, the subjects who felt subjectively poorer were harsher in their judgments of the harmful behaviors than those who felt relatively well off. However, there was no difference between the two groups in their evaluations of the victimless actions. A further analysis showed that the relationship between financial insecurity and harsher moral judgments was mediated by feelings of vulnerability (but not by any of the other mood and personality variables that were collected).

When I started reading this article, I thought it might shed some light on the psychology of religion. We know that religiosity is higher in the world's poorest nations, and feelings of vulnerability seem like a plausible explanation. However, I would expect religiosity to be associated with more punitive moral judgments of victimless transgressions as well as those with victims. The experiment finds that lack of material resources only causes harsher judgments of actions that do real harm to victims.

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