IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/nat/nathum/v7y2023i1d10.1038_s41562-022-01480-x.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Market exposure and human morality

Author

Listed:
  • Benjamin Enke

    (Harvard University
    National Bureau of Economic Research)

Abstract

According to evolutionary theories, markets may foster an internalized and universalist prosociality because it supports market-based cooperation. This paper uses the cultural folklore of 943 pre-industrial ethnolinguistic groups to show that a society’s degree of market interactions, proxied by the presence of intercommunity trade and money, is associated with the cultural salience of (1) prosocial behaviour, (2) interpersonal trust, (3) universalist moral values and (4) moral emotions of guilt, shame and anger. To provide tentative evidence that a part of this correlation reflects a causal effect of market interactions, the analysis leverages both fine-grained geographic variation across neighbouring historical societies and plausibly exogenous variation in the presence of markets that arises through proximity to historical trade routes or the local degree of ecological diversity. The results suggest that the coevolutionary process involving markets and morality partly consists of economic markets shaping a moral system of a universalist and internalized prosociality.

Suggested Citation

  • Benjamin Enke, 2023. "Market exposure and human morality," Nature Human Behaviour, Nature, vol. 7(1), pages 134-141, January.
    • Handle: RePEc:nat:nathum:v:7:y:2023:i:1:d:10.1038_s41562-022-01480-x
    DOI: 10.1038/s41562-022-01480-x
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-022-01480-x
    File Function: Abstract
    Download Restriction: Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1038/s41562-022-01480-x?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Pies, Ingo, 2023. "Folk Economics und Folk Ethics als moralisches Problem: Ordonomische Anregungen zur Business Ethics," Discussion Papers 2023-12, Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg, Chair of Economic Ethics.
    2. Roberto A. Weber & Sili Zhang, 2023. "What Money Can Buy: How Market Exchange Promotes Values," CESifo Working Paper Series 10809, CESifo.
    3. Pies, Ingo, 2023. "Folk economics and folk ethics as problems of moral reasoning: Ordonomic inspirations for business ethics," Discussion Papers 2023-13, Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg, Chair of Economic Ethics.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nat:nathum:v:7:y:2023:i:1:d:10.1038_s41562-022-01480-x. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.nature.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.