Review by Choice Review
Social psychologists Hitlin and Harkness (both, Univ. of Iowa) 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. This could have yielded a traditional East/West division. Instead, 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. The researchers then ran 2,000 simulations using equivalently weighted sentences from each of these languages to see if the patterns of moral emotions correlated with inequality. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students/faculty. --Beau Weston, Centre College
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
