Abstract
Lower socioeconomic status is a burden on people’s psychological well-being. For long, this burden was assumed to vanish with nations’ increasing economic development. Recent findings, however, suggest that economic development does not alleviate the burden; in fact, lower socioeconomic status predicts lower well-being more strongly in developed nations than developing ones. We suggest 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 socioeconomic status and cast a bad light on higher socioeconomic status. In this talk, I will present findings from three large-scale global datasets and suggest a roadmap of future research.