[IPEAD 2025_02] IPEAD Working Papers - A, B, and C

Working Paper B 

Kho, Mu-Jeong (2025). Negative Emotions and Institutional Life: An Institutional and Behavioural Analysis of Comparison, Appraisal and Emotional Acceptance. IPEAD Working Paper Series B: Economics, Politics, and Philosophy (EPP), Vol. 10, No. 2 (Summer), June 1, 2025. The Institute for Political Economy and Development (IPEAD: www.ipead.net), Republic of Korea, pp. 1–26. Retrieved from www.ipead.net

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1. Summary of the Article

This article critiques the prevalent discourse that dismisses negative emotions (e.g. envy, jealousy, and anger) as mere individual maladaptation or moral shortcomings. By developing a critical synthesis of institutional economics, behavioural economics, social psychology, and cognitive psychology, it examines how the emotional acceptance of distress can remain fully compatible with criticism of—and demands for reform against—the institutional structures that repeatedly generate such feelings.

• Four Analytical Questions: The author disentangles every episode of negative emotion into four distinct analytical dimensions:
  
  
  1. Descriptive: Whether the emotion actually occurs, its intensity, and its duration.
     
     
  2. Epistemic: Whether the underlying empirical beliefs are accurate and whether the appraisal is fitting in its evaluative object and intensity.
     
     
  3. Normative: Whether experiencing, expressing, or acting upon the emotion is morally justified given the claims and interests of others.
     
     
  4. Consequential: The empirical consequences for individual well-being, judgment, and institutional relationships.
     
     
     By separating these dimensions, the framework establishes that the mere occurrence of an emotion neither settles its moral justification nor substantiates a structural grievance.
     
     
• Three Institutional Dimensions: To connect individual emotional experience with broader social structures, the paper delineates three institutional dimensions:
  
  
  1. Formation of Evaluative Standards: Drawing on Veblen's pecuniary emulation and invidious comparison, alongside Hodgson's concept of reconstitutive downward causation, this dimension explains how social institutions shape habits of valuation—dictating which advantages register as objects of envy or concern.
     
     
  2. Authorisation of Responses: Building upon Commons's working rules, Hochschild's feeling rules, and Bush's ceremonial encapsulation, this dimension analyzes how social structures govern whose expressions of distress are acknowledged as legitimate and whose grievances are suppressed or penalised.
     
     
  3. Distribution of Opportunities to Act: Incorporating Hirschman's framework of exit and voice as well as Commons's typology of transactions (bargaining, managerial, and rationing), this dimension examines how capabilities and channels for translating discontent into collective action or institutional redress are distributed.
     
     
• Central Argument and Conditional Propositions: The paper emphasizes that individual psychological relief (achieved via emotion regulation or acceptance) cannot validate an indefensible ranking, establish the fairness of an allocation, or substitute for structural reform. Integrating these institutional dimensions with system justification theory and emotion regulation models, the author derives four testable, conditional propositions ($P_1$–$P_4$) specifying the conditions under which personal relief and institutional redress diverge in practice.
  
  

2. Contribution to Knowledge

• Interdisciplinary Synthesis Across Economics and Social Sciences:
  
  
  • The article achieves a comprehensive macroeconomic and microeconomic synthesis by bridging classical institutional economics (Veblen, Commons, Hodgson) with contemporary behavioural economics and psychological literature (emotion regulation, system justification theory). It brings 'negative emotions'—a domain historically neglected by mainstream neoclassical economics—into the core of institutional and political economic analysis.
    
    
• Transcending Psychological Reductionism:
  
  
  • The paper theoretically exposes how the contemporary therapeutic paradigm—which treats emotional distress primarily as a problem of individual self-regulation—can serve as an ideological mechanism that obscures structural contradictions and institutional exploitation. By establishing an analytical framework that strictly decouples psychological coping from institutional redress, it provides a rigorous basis for structural critique.
    
    
• Formulating an Empirical and Theoretical Foundation for Future Inquiry:
  
  
  • By contextualising key topics in contemporary empirical economics—such as pay transparency, income inequality, resource disparities, and employee voice—within an institutional theory of affect, the article articulates precise, testable propositions ($P_1$–$P_4$) to guide future empirical research.
    
    

3. Originality

• Novel Synthesis of Philosophical Appraisals and Institutional Analysis:
  
  
  • The article innovatively marries philosophical distinctions between 'accuracy' and 'fittingness' (D'Arms & Jacobson) with institutional rules and transactional frameworks. This creates a nuanced methodological architecture that prevents the conflation of descriptive emotional occurrences with normative claims of injustice.
    
    
• Elucidating the Mechanistic Divergence Between 'Personal Relief' and 'Institutional Redress':
  
  
  • The paper offers a novel critique of how individual emotion regulation and acceptance can paradoxically dampen collective impetus for structural change by altering appraisals of injustice. Unpacking this systematic divergence between psychological mitigation and institutional redress represents a highly original contribution to the political economy of emotion.
    
    
• Reactivating Classical Institutionalism in the Behavioural Era:
  
  
  • By linking Veblenian pecuniary emulation and Commonsian working rules with contemporary empirical literature (e.g. peer effects in lottery studies, pay transparency experiments) and process models of emotion regulation (Gross), the paper demonstrates the enduring vitality and critical power of original institutional economics in addressing 21st-century behavioural phenomena.