19 Social psychologist Seymour Epstein theorized a hierarchical model where overall self-esteem is the first-order dimension of a person’s self-assessment, and second-order dimensions relating to general competence, moral self-approval, power, and love worthiness contribute to the assessment of self-esteem. We develop a similar model here, with safety and self-esteem as first-level needs, and material possessions, social status, achievement, affiliation, and morality as second-level resources fulfilling first-level needs. See Seymour Epstein, “Self-Concept Revisited: Or a Theory of a Theory,” American Psychologist 28, no. 5 (1973): 404–16.
20 Geoffrey Supran and Naomi Oreskes, “Assessing ExxonMobil’s Climate Change Communications (1977–2014),” Environmental Research Letters 12, no. 8 (2017): 1–18.
21 M. B. Glaser, “Exxon Primer on CO2 Greenhouse Effect,” Memo to Exxon Management, 1982; Lisa Song, Neela Banerjee, and David Hasemeyer, “Exxon Confirmed Global Warming Consensus in 1982 with In-House Climate Models,” Inside Climate News, September 22, 2015, https://insideclimatenews.org/news/22092015/exxon-confirmed-global-warming-consensus-in-1982-with-in-house-climate-models/.
22 Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (New York: Knopf, 2017).
23 Robert J. Brulle, “Institutionalizing Delay: Foundation Funding and the Creation of U.S. Climate Change Counter-Movement Organizations,” Climatic Change 122, no. 4 (2014): 681–94.
24 Amy Lieberman and Susanne Rust, “Big Oil Companies United to Fight Regulations, but Spent Millions Bracing for Climate Change,” Los Angeles Times, December 31, 2015, https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-oil-operations-20151231-story.html.
25 Noam Chomsky, Who Rules the World? (New York: Henry Holt, 2016).
26 George Marshall, Don’t Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015).
27 Milton Friedman, “A Friedman Doctrine: The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits,” New York Times, September 13, 1970, https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/13/archives/a-friedman-doctrine-the-social-responsibility-of-business-is-to.html.
28 Thomas Piketty, Capital and Ideology, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020).
29 For a study of status-signaling consumption to boost self-esteem, see Niro Sivanathan and Nathan C. Pettit, “Protecting the Self through Consumption: Status Goods as Affirmational Commodities,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 46, no. 3 (May 1, 2010): 564–70.
30 See Michael Hughes, Forging Napoleon’s Grande Armée: Motivation, Military Culture, and Masculinity in the French Army, 1800–1808 (New York: New York University Press, 2012). According to the biography of a contemporary French statesman, Napoleon responded to criticism of the Legion of Honor as merely symbolic, and description of its associated medals as mere baubles by saying, “You call these baubles, well, it is with baubles that men are led… Do you think that you would be able to make men fight by reasoning? Never. That is good only for the scholar in his study. The soldier needs glory, distinctions, rewards.” Antoine-Claire Thibaudeau, Mémoires sur le Consulat 1799 à 1804 (Paris: Chez Ponthieu et Cie, 1827), 83–84.
31 Aruna Ranganathan, “The Artisan and His Audience: Identification with Work and Price Setting in a Handicraft Cluster in Southern India,” Administrative Science Quarterly 63, no. 3 (2018): 637–67.
32 For an overview of the positive association between socioeconomic status and self-esteem, see Jean Twenge and W. Keith Campbell, “Self-Esteem and Socioeconomic Status: A Meta-Analytic Review,” Personality and Social Psychology Review 6, no. 1 (February 2002): 59–71. The meta-analysis shows that the positive correlation between socioeconomic status and self-esteem is stronger for occupation and education than for income. Social rank therefore feeds our sense of worth more than economic status.
33 While this theory on the relationship between foot-binding and suitability for marriage is popular, it is not without its skeptics. Laurel Bossen and Hill Gates argue and show that the pervasiveness of foot-binding among rural women in the nineteenth century in no way improved their marital prospects, undermining the dominant explanation for the social value of foot-binding. What it did do, however, was create a captive hand-labor workforce, especially in the thriving textile production in imperial China. When the industrial revolution changed the value of hand labor, scholars argue, the custom of foot-binding rapidly declined. See Laurel Bossen and Hill Gates, Bound Feet, Young Hands: Tracking the Demise of Footbinding in Village China (Stanford University Press, 2017); Howard S. Levy, Chinese Footbinding: The History of a Curious Erotic Custom (New York: Bell, 1967).
34 Appiah, The Honor Code, 98–100.
35 Stefan Kanfer, The Last Empire: De Beers, Diamonds, and the World (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995).
36 In psychology, there are competing models of people’s needs and wants. David McClelland’s model focuses on affiliation, achievement, and power as key motivational needs; Edward Deci and Richard Ryan’s self-determination theory refers instead to relatedness, competence, and autonomy. See David C. McClelland, Human Motivation (Glenview, IL: Scott Foresman, 1985); Edward L. Deci and Richard Ryan, “Self-Determination Theory,” in Handbook of Theories of Social Psychology, ed. Paul A. M. Van Lange, Arie W. Kruglanski, and E. Tory Higgins (London: SAGE, 2012), 416–36. Similarly, in their book Beyond Reason: Using Emotions as You Negotiate (New York: Viking Penguin, 2005), negotiation experts Roger Fisher and Daniel Shapiro identify five “core concerns” that people bring to negotiations: appreciation, affiliation, status, role, and autonomy. The similarities outweigh the differences, however, and our approach is to synthesize these models to provide an integrated view of what people value in their pursuit of safety and self-esteem as basic needs.
37 George Valliant, Triumphs of Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).
38 Liz Mineo, “Good Genes Are Nice, but Joy Is Better,” Harvard Gazette, April 11, 2017, https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2017/04/over-nearly-80-years-harvard-study-has-been-showing-how-to-live-a-healthy-and-happy-life/.
39 For the study’s complete dataset, see George Vaillant, Charles McArthur, and Arlie Bock, “Grant Study of Adult Development, 1938–2000,” Harvard Dataverse, vol. 4 (2010).
40 Christian Jordan, Virgil Zeigler-Hill, and Jessica Cameron, “Self-Esteem,” in Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences, eds. Virgil Zeigler-Hill and Todd Shackelford (Springer, 2019). Frances Frei and Anne Morriss also explore the importance of leading by fostering trust, love, and belonging in work environments for people to thrive in Unleashed: The Unapologetic Leader’s Guide to Empowering Everyone Around You (Boston: Harvard Business Press, 2020).
41 Scott Veale, “Word for Word/Last Words; Voices From Above: ‘I Love You, Mommy, Goodbye,’ ” New York Times, September 16, 2001, https://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/16/weekinreview/word-for-word-last-words-voices-from-above-i-love-you-mommy-goodbye.html; CNN, “Paris Terror: Survivor: Kept Saying I Love You,” July 21, 2016, video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5hp6SWXSKg.
42 Daniel Burke, “Coronavirus Preys on What Terrifies Us: Dying Alone,” CNN, March 29, 2020, https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/29/world/funerals-dying-alone-coronavirus/index.html.
43 Dominic Abrams and Michael A. Hogg, “Comments on the Motivational Status of Self-Esteem in Social Identity and Intergroup Discrimination,” European Journal of Social Psychology 18, no. 4 (1988): 317–34.
44 Andreas Schleicher, PISA 2018: Insights and Interpretations (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 2019).
45 Kate Wintrol, “Is Mens Sana in Corpore Sano a Concept Relevant to Honors Students?” Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council—Online Archive 291 (2010): https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/nchcjournal/291.
46 Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer, The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work (Boston: Harvard Business Press
, 2011).
47 Joris Lammers et al., “To Have Control Over or to Be Free from Others? The Desire for Power Reflects a Need for Autonomy,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 42, no. 4 (2016): 498–512. How our desire for autonomy is manifested can vary based on our cultural context and upbringing. Researchers have found, for instance, that Asian American children performed a task decoding anagrams best when the set of anagrams they decoded were said to have been chosen by their mother, whereas Anglo-American children performed best when they were allowed to select which set of anagrams to decode (see Sheena Iyengar and Mark R. Lepper, “Rethinking the Value of Choice: A Cultural Perspective on Intrinsic Motivation,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 76, no. 3 [1999]: 349–66). Despite the cultural and context contingency inherent in how we approach autonomy, researchers have found evidence that a desire for choice is nonetheless innate and likely biological in both humans and other animals. (See Lauren A. Leotti, Sheena S. Iyengar, and Kevin N. Ochsner, “Born to Choose: The Origins and Value of the Need for Control,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 14, no. 10 [2010]: 457–63.) See also Sheena Iyengar, The Art of Choosing (New York: Twelve, 2011).
48 Francesca Gino, Maryam Kouchaki, and Adam D. Galinsky, “The Moral Virtue of Authenticity: How Inauthenticity Produces Feelings of Immorality and Impurity,” Psychological Science 26, no. 7 (2015): 983–96.
49 Paul P. Baard, Edward L. Deci, and Richard M. Ryan, “Intrinsic Need Satisfaction: A Motivational Basis of Performance and Well-Being in Two Work Settings,” Journal of Applied Social Psychology 34, no. 10 (2004): 2045–68; Jeffery Pfeffer, Dying for a Paycheck: How Modern Management Harms Employee Health and Company Performance—and What We Can Do About It (New York: Harper Business, 2018).
50 Fintan O’Toole, Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain (London: Head of Zeus Ltd., 2018).
51 Paraphrased from Jennifer Szalai, “Fear and Fumbling: Brexit, Trump, and the Nationalist Surge,” New York Times, December 18, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/18/books/review-politics-pain-fintan-otoole-case-for-nationalism-rich-lowry.html/.
52 M. Ena Inesi et al., “Power and Choice: Their Dynamic Interplay in Quenching the Thirst for Personal Control,” Psychological Science 22, no. 8 (2011): 1042–1048; Stefan Leach, Mario Weick, and Joris Lammers, “Does Influence Beget Autonomy? Clarifying the Relationship between Social and Personal Power,” Journal of Theoretical Social Psychology 1, no. 1 (2017): 5–14.
53 Jon K. Maner, “Dominance and Prestige: A Tale of Two Hierarchies,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 26, no. 6 (2017): 526–31.
54 Edward O. Wilson, On Human Nature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 107–9.
55 R. Todd Jewell, Afsheen Moti, and Dennis Coates, “A Brief History of Violence and Aggression in Spectator Sports,” in Violence and Aggression in Sporting Contests: Economics, History and Policy, ed. R. Todd Jewell (New York: Springer, 2012), 15.
56 Minda Zetlin, “New Zealand Prime Minister Won’t Say Christchurch Mosque Shooter’s Name,” Inc., March 20, 2019, https://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/jacinda-arden-dont-say-christchurch-mosque-killers-name.html.
57 Jamil Zaki, The War for Kindness: Building Empathy in a Fractured World (New York: Crown, 2019), 52–9.
58 Émile Durkheim, Sociology and Philosophy (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1953); Émile Durkheim, “Social Facts,” in Readings in the Philosophy of Social Science, ed. Michael Martin and Lee C. McIntyre (Boston: MIT Press, 1994), 433–40.
59 Thomas Hobbes, De Cive: The English Version Entitled, in the First Edition, Philosophicall Rudiments concerning Government and Society, ed. Howard Warrender (Oxfordshire: Clarendon Press, 1983), 49.
60 Judith M. Burkart, Rahel K. Brügger, and Carel P. Van Schaik, “Evolutionary Origins of Morality: Insights From Non-human Primates,” Frontiers in Sociology 3 (2018). For further exploration of the relationship between morality and evolution, see Todd K. Shackelford and Ranald D. Hansen, eds., The Evolution of Morality (Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing AG, 2015).
61 Wilson, On Human Nature, 154.
62 Michael Kernis and Brian Goldman, “Stability and Variability in Self-Concept and Self-Esteem,” in Handbook of Self and Identity, eds. Mark R. Leary and June Price Tangney (New York: Guilford Press, 2003), 106–27.
63 Excerpted from Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011), 77.
64 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (New York: Start Publishing LLC, 2013).
65 Immanuel Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, ed. Thomas E. Hill, trans. Arnulf Zweig (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).
66 Yong Huang, “Confucius and Mencius on the Motivation to be Moral,” Philosophy East and West 60, no 1. (2010): 65–87.
67 Leon Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (Stanford University Press, 1957).
68 Eliza Barclay and Brian Resnick, “How Big Was the Global Climate Strike? 4 Million People, Activists Estimate,” Vox, September 22, 2019, https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2019/9/20/20876143/climate-strike-2019-september-20-crowd-estimate.
69 Wilson, On Human Nature, 163.
70 Peter L. Jennings, Marie S. Mitchell, and Sean T. Hannah, “The Moral Self: A Review and Integration of the Literature,” Journal of Organizational Behavior 36, no. S1 (February 2015): S104–68.
71 Katherine A. DeCelles et al., “Does Power Corrupt or Enable? When and Why Power Facilitates Self-Interested Behavior,” Journal of Applied Psychology 97, no. 3 (2012): 681.
72 Simon May, Nietzsche’s Ethics and His War on “Morality” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
73 “What Impact Has Activism Had on the Fur Industry?” Scientific American, June 15, 2009, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/impact-activism-on-fur/.
74 Names and places are disguised for confidentiality.
75 Ning in discussion with the authors, November 2019.
76 The psychology of social judgments has developed along overlapping tracks, which agree on the existence of two fundamental dimensions along which people evaluate others but have labeled them slightly differently. Social psychologist Bogdan Wojciszke distinguishes between competence and morality (see Bogdan Wojciszke, “Affective Concomitants of Information on Morality and Competence,” European Psychologist 10, no. 1 [2005]: 60–70), while social psychologists Susan Fiske, Amy Cuddy, and Peter Glick (Susan Fiske, Amy Cuddy, and Peter Glick, “Universal Dimensions of Social Cognition: Warmth and Competence,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 11, no. 2 [2007]: 77–83), as well as Amy Cuddy, Presence (New York: Little, Brown & Co., 2016) talk about competence and warmth. The underlying meaning of those two dimensions is similar. In parallel, psychologists of trust distinguish between affect-based trust and cognition-based trust. Affect-based trust refers to emotional bonds between individuals that presuppose genuine care and concern for the welfare of partners. Cognition-based trust is based on knowledge and expectations concerning an individual’s competence and performance reliability (see Daniel J. McAllister, “Affect-and Cognition-Based Trust as Foundations for Interpersonal Cooperation in Organizations,” Academy of Management Journal 38, no. 1 [1995]: 24–59). Similarly, Mayer, Davis, and Schoorman have identified benevolence and competence as primarily affective and cognitive dimensions of trust, respectively (see Roger C. Mayer, James H. Davis, and F. David Schoorman, “An Integrative Model of Organizational Trust: Past, Present, and Future,” Academy of Management Review 20, no. 3 [1995]: 709–34).
77 Tiziana Casciaro and Miguel Sousa Lobo, “When Competence Is Irrelevant: The Role of Interpersonal Affect in Task-Related Ties,” Administrative Science Quarterly 53, no. 4 (2008): 655–84; Tiziana Casciaro and Miguel Sousa Lobo, “Affective Primacy in Intraorganizational Task Networks,” Organization Science 26, no. 2 (2015): 373–89.
78 Tiziana Casciaro and Miguel Sousa Lobo, “Competent Jerks, Lovable Fools, and the Formation of Social Networks,” Harvard Business Review 83 (2005
): 92–9.
79 Miller McPherson, Lynn Smith-Lovin, and James M. Cook, “Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks,” Annual Review of Sociology 27, no. 1 (2001): 415–44; Robert B. Zajonc, “Attitudinal Effects of Mere Exposure,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 9, no. 2, Pt.2 (1968): 1–27.
4. WHO CONTROLS ACCESS TO WHAT WE VALUE?
1 Donatella Versace in discussion with the authors, November 2019.
2 For an example of the limits of formal authority, see Julie Battilana and Tiziana Casciaro, “Change Agents, Networks, and Institutions: A Contingency Theory of Organizational Change,” Academy of Management Journal 55, no. 2 (2012): 381–98; and Julie Battilana and Tiziana Casciaro, “The Network Secrets of Great Change Agents,” Harvard Business Review 91, no.7–8 (2013): 62–68. See also Linda A. Hill and Kent Lineback, Being the Boss: The 3 Imperatives for Becoming a Great Leader (Boston, MA: Harvard Business Press, 2011).
3 Michael Morris, Joel Podolny, and Sheira Ariel, “Missing Relations: Incorporating Relational Constructs into Models of Culture,” in Innovations in International and Cross Cultural Management, ed. P. C. Earley and H. Singh (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 2000), 52–90.
4 Michele Gelfand, Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire Our World (New York: Scribner, 2018). See also Erin Meyer, The Culture Map: Decoding How People Think, Lead, and Get Things Done Across Cultures (New York: PublicAffairs, 2016).
5 François Hollande in conversation with the authors, July 2019.
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