Why is Violence More Common Where Inequality is Greater?

TLDR

Income inequality is a well‑established environmental determinant of violence, with more unequal societies exhibiting higher rates of violent crime and homicide, and epidemiological research shows that inequality also harms health, underscoring its corrosive social effects. The study examines how income inequality drives violence, particularly why the poor tend to attack each other, by linking higher crime rates in unequal societies to poorer social relations in hierarchical structures and contrasting competitive dominance strategies with affiliative egalitarian ones. The authors employ social‑determinants‑of‑health research and evolutionary primate‑ranking theory to analyze how dominance hierarchies foster competitive strategies that increase violence, whereas egalitarian structures promote affiliative strategies that reduce it. The results confirm that inequality is socially corrosive, with policy implications underscoring the importance of liberty, equality, and fraternity for improving social quality of life.

Abstract

The most well-established environmental determinant of levels of violence is the scale of income differences between rich and poor. More unequal societies tend to be more violent. If this is a relation between institutional violence and personal violence, how does it work and why is most of the violence a matter of the poor attacking the poor rather than the rich? This paper begins by showing that the tendency for rates of violent crime and homicide to be higher where there is more inequality is part of a more general tendency for the quality of social relations to be poorer in more hierarchical societies. Research on the social determinants of health is used to explore these relationships. It is a powerful source of insights because health is also harmed by greater inequality. Because epidemiological research has gone some way towards identifying the nature of our sensitivity to the social environment and to social status differentials in particular, it provides important insights into why violence is related to inequality. The picture that emerges substantiates and explains the common intuition that inequality is socially corrosive. With an evolutionary slant, and informed by work on ranking systems in non-human primates, this paper focuses on the sharp distinction between competitive social strategies appropriate to dominance hierarchies and the more affiliative social strategies associated with more egalitarian social structures. The implications for policy seem to echo the importance to the quality of life of the three inter-related dimensions of the social environment expressed in the demand for "liberty, equality, fraternity."