Local Competition Amplifies the Corrosive Effects of Inequality

High economic inequality is linked to greater moralization

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.

When are people more open to cheating? Economic inequality makes people expect more everyday unethical behavior

Economic inequality has been found to be associated with increased unethical behavior and an increased acceptance of unethical behavior. In this paper we explored whether higher amounts of perceived inequality lead to an increase in the expectation of unethical behavior. We tested whether people would say that they themselves would engage in more unethical behavior in a context of high compared to low inequality. We find evidence for this hypothesis in 3 of 4 studies (n = 3,038). An internal meta-analysis shows a small but significant effect. Such increased expectations that oneself will behave unethically likely has consequences for societal trust and functioning.

Perceptions of Income Inequality and Women's Intrasexual Competition

Income inequality has been empirically linked to interpersonal competition and risk-taking behaviors, but a separate line of findings consistently shows that individuals have inaccurate perceptions of the actual levels of income inequality in society. How can inequality be both consistently misperceived and yet a reliable predictor of behavior? The present study extends both these lines of research by evaluating if the scope of input used to assess income inequality (i.e., at the national, state, county, or postal code level) can account for perception discrepancies and if actual/perceived inequality is associated with female intrasexual competition. Female participants recruited online from the general US population (n = 691) provided demographic information, measures of perceived income inequality, and measures of intrasexual competition attitudes and behavior. Actual and perceived income inequality (at any level) did not predict negative attitudes toward other women or female weighting of physical appearance as a desirable trait. Perceived income inequality and actual county-level inequality was, however, predictive of female competition in the form of self-sexualization clothing choice. Further analyses found that age and importance placed on physical attractiveness also predicted women's clothing choices. Perceptions of income inequality were predicted not by actual Gini indices, but by beliefs about the levels of poverty and income gaps. These results highlight the importance of better understanding the proximate cues by which people perceive environmental features such as inequality, and how those cues are used to adjust interpersonal behaviors.

Why is violence high and persistent in deprived communities? A formal model

There is massive variation in rates of violence across time and space. These rates are positively associated with economic deprivation and inequality. They also tend to display a degree of local persistence, or 'enduring neighbourhood effects'. Here, we identify a single mechanism that can produce all three observations. We formalize it in a mathematical model, which specifies how individual-level processes generate the population-level patterns. Our model assumes that agents try to keep their level of resources above a 'desperation threshold', to reflect the intuitive notion that one of people's priorities is to always meet their basic needs. As shown in previous work, being below the threshold makes risky actions, such as property crime, beneficial. We simulate populations with heterogeneous levels of resources. When deprivation or inequality is high, there are more desperate individuals, hence a higher risk of exploitation. It then becomes advantageous to use violence, to send a 'toughness signal' to exploiters. For intermediate levels of poverty, the system is bistable and we observe hysteresis: populations can be violent because they were deprived or unequal in the past, even after conditions improve. We discuss implications of our findings for policy and interventions aimed at reducing violence.

The evolution of extraordinary self-sacrifice

From a theoretical perspective, individuals are expected to sacrifice their welfare only when the benefits outweigh the costs. In nature, however, the costs of altruism and spite can be extreme, as in cases of irreversible sterility and self-destructive weaponry. Here we show that “extraordinary” self-sacrifice—in which actors pay costs that exceed the benefits they give or the costs they impose on recipients—can evolve in structured populations, where social actions bring secondary benefits to neighboring kin. When given information about dispersal, sedentary actors evolve extraordinary altruism towards dispersing kin. Likewise, when given information about dispersal and kinship, sedentary actors evolve extraordinary spite towards sedentary nonkin. Our results can thus be summed up by a simple rule: extraordinary self-sacrifice evolves when the actor’s neighbors are close kin and the recipient’s neighbors are not.

Subjective Economic Inequality Decreases Emotional Intelligence, Especially for People of High Social Class

Across five studies (three preregistered; N = 2,481), we investigated two effects as follows: (1) Is higher subjective economic inequality associated with a decreased ability to accurately identify emotions (emotional intelligence)? When inequality is high, people are less focused on others and may thus be less motivated to correctly identify their emotions. (2) Is this main effect of subjective inequality qualified by an interaction with socioeconomic status (SES)? Past research suggests that high SES leads to lower emotional intelligence because people of higher SES are less dependent on others and thus less motivated to identify their emotions. When perceiving higher inequality, high SES individuals should feel even more self-reliant, thereby exacerbating the difference in emotional intelligence between people of low and high SES. We provide empirical support in three out of five studies for the first and in four out of five studies for the second hypothesis. An internal meta-analysis supported both hypotheses.

Theoretical perspectives on organizations and organizing in a post-growth era

The fundamental assumption we base this Special Issue on is that narrow concepts of growth have become the ruling ideas of this age, entrenched both in everyday life and to a considerable extent in the theoretical thinking and traditions of research conducted by organization and management studies scholars. We explain how tacit (or overt) endorsement of unbridled economic growth (the growth imperative) has pernicious practical effects and how it tends to restrict the intellectual base of the field. We argue that notions of degrowth present scholars with challenges as well as opportunities to reframe core assumptions and develop new directions in theory and research. Envisioning a post-COVID 19 world where societies and organizations can flourish without growth is one of the most difficult tasks facing theorists. We approach this challenge first by discussing the hegemonic properties of growth ideology and second by sketching an alternative political economy as a context for reimagining social and economic relations within planetary capacities in a post-growth era. Drawing on degrowth literature in ecological economics, sociology and political ecology, we identify key principles relevant to processes of organizing for a more just and environmentally sustainable future: frugal abundance, conviviality, care, and open relocalization. We conclude by introducing the three articles we feature in this issue along with some thoughts about theorizing policy and regulatory changes needed to generate transformational change and a future research agenda.

Economic inequality affects perceived normative values

The degree of economic inequality may lead to different environments where people develop motives and behaviours that lend them higher chances of survival. However, the specific features attributed to an environment with a particular level of economic inequality have received little research attention. In this research, we explored how perceived economic inequality may influence the values inferred as normative in society. Results from three studies, one correlational and two experimental, showed that perceived normative values change according to the degree of perceived economic inequality in a given context: higher levels of perceived economic inequality are related to normative self-enhancement values, whereas lower levels of perceived economic inequality are related to normative self-transcendence values. These results are discussed in terms of how information on economic inequality is used to build a general perception of the normative climate in society and, accordingly, of the values that would best guide behaviours.

Income inequality not gender inequality positively covaries with female sexualization on social media

Publicly displayed, sexualized depictions of women have proliferated, enabled by new communication technologies, including the internet and mobile devices. These depictions are often claimed to be outcomes of a culture of gender inequality and female oppression, but, paradoxically, recent rises in sexualization are most notable in societies that have made strong progress toward gender parity. Few empirical tests of the relation between gender inequality and sexualization exist, and there are even fewer tests of alternative hypotheses. We examined aggregate patterns in 68,562 sexualized self-portrait photographs ("sexy selfies") shared publicly on Twitter and Instagram and their association with city-, county-, and cross-national indicators of gender inequality. We then investigated the association between sexy-selfie prevalence and income inequality, positing that sexualization-a marker of high female competition-is greater in environments in which incomes are unequal and people are preoccupied with relative social standing. Among 5,567 US cities and 1,622 US counties, areas with relatively more sexy selfies were more economically unequal but not more gender oppressive. A complementary pattern emerged cross-nationally (113 nations): Income inequality positively covaried with sexy-selfie prevalence, particularly within more developed nations. To externally validate our findings, we investigated and confirmed that economically unequal (but not gender-oppressive) areas in the United States also had greater aggregate sales in goods and services related to female physical appearance enhancement (beauty salons and women's clothing). Here, we provide an empirical understanding of what female sexualization reflects in societies and why it proliferates.