The merciless mind in a dog-eat-dog society: neoliberalism and the indifference to social inequality

Neoliberalism asserts that to preserve individual liberty, an effective competitive market must be established to allow individuals to freely choose their economic activities and to reward individuals according to their merits. This ideology has been criticized for condoning social inequality by attributing the presence of social hierarchy to innate or learned personal qualities. We review existing psychological research that has treated neoliberalism as a cluster of personal beliefs and supplement this review with a cross-cultural analysis of 40 societies that differ along two dimensions of neoliberalism: presence of economic freedom and believing in meritocracy. At the individual level, subscription to neoliberalism is positively associated with confidence in personal control, endorsement of system justification, social exclusion of disadvantaged groups, and reluctance to take remedial collective actions that would reduce social inequality. At the society level, the presence of economic freedom and popular support for meritocracy in prototypic neoliberal societies jointly predict greater acceptance of unequal power distribution in these societies, even after controlling for the actual level of economic inequality.