Does (National) Religiosity Ease the Psychological Burden of Lower SES?

Lower socioeconomic status (SES; here: lower income, education, and job prestige) is a burden on people’s psychological well-being. For long, this burden was assumed to vanish with the nations’ increasing economic development. Recent findings, however, suggest that economic development does not alleviate the burden; in fact, lower SES predicts lower well-being more strongly in economically developed nations than in economically less developed ones. Our preliminary research (Berkessel et al., 2021) found that national religiosity may explain this effect: economically developed nations are less religious and therefore lack religious norms that buffer the negative consequences of lower SES and cast a bad light on higher SES. The proposed project examines what conditions need to be met for national religiosity to lower the psychological burden of lower SES (WP1), what religious and emotional processes underlie this effect (WP2), and how the strength of this effect develops over time in the face of a dynamically changing religious landscape (WP3).