Trager Jackson, Atari Mohammad
Department of Psychology, University of Southern California, Seeley G. Mudd Building, 3620 McClintock Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90089, USA.
Brain and Creativity Institute, University of Southern California, Seeley G. Mudd Building, 3620 McClintock Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90089, USA.
PNAS Nexus. 2025 Jun 24;4(6):pgaf158. doi: 10.1093/pnasnexus/pgaf158. eCollection 2025 Jun.
In some societies, people find excessive wealth immoral, while others are structured so that having too much money is morally neutral or even praised. Here, we show that moral judgments of excessive wealth are distinguishable from moral judgments of economic inequality and examine how people's moral concerns and national inequality predict the immorality of excessive wealth around the globe. Using demographically stratified samples from 20 nations ( ), we find that across all countries, people do not find excessive wealth very immoral, with notable variability such that more equal and wealthy societies (e.g. Belgium, Switzerland) consider having too much money more wrong. People's equality and purity concerns reliably predicted their condemnation of excessive wealth, whereas loyalty, authority, and proportionality concerns were negatively associated with condemnation of excessive wealth across societies after controlling for the moralization of inequality, religiosity, political ideology, and demographic variables. We conducted a follow-up study in the United States ( ), showing that moral purity is more broadly linked to the moralization of beyond wealth, even after controlling for different ways of wealth acquisition and spending. Collectively, these cross-cultural results demonstrate that some moral intuitions shape our moral judgment of excessive wealth above and beyond economic inequality.
在一些社会中，人们认为过度的财富是不道德的，而在其他社会结构中，拥有过多的金钱在道德上是中立的，甚至是受到赞扬的。在此，我们表明，对过度财富的道德判断与对经济不平等的道德判断是有区别的，并考察人们的道德关切和国家不平等如何预测全球范围内过度财富的不道德性。使用来自20个国家的人口分层样本，我们发现，在所有国家中，人们并不认为过度财富非常不道德，存在显著差异，即更平等和富裕的社会（如比利时、瑞士）认为拥有过多金钱更错误。在控制了不平等的道德化、宗教信仰、政治意识形态和人口变量后，人们对平等和纯洁的关切可靠地预测了他们对过度财富的谴责，而忠诚、权威和相称性关切在不同社会中与对过度财富的谴责呈负相关。我们在美国进行了一项后续研究，结果表明，即使在控制了财富获取和支出的不同方式之后，道德纯洁性与超出财富范畴的道德化更广泛地相关联。总体而言，这些跨文化结果表明，一些道德直觉塑造了我们对过度财富的道德判断，而不仅仅是经济不平等。
