Abstract
Morality not only serves as the standard of right and wrong behavior, it also plays a central role in people’s everyday social interactions. The current study examined how mental representations of morality violations are shared across Western and non-Western cultures, utilizing Shweder’s three ethics of Autonomy, Community, and Divinity. First, Japanese and American undergraduates were instructed on the definitions of these three ethic domains and were asked to freely describe any situations they could think of concerning violations in each domain. A subset of these descriptions of violations that correctly matched Shweder’s original definitions were then given to a separate sample of Japanese and American college students, who then categorized each situation into one of the three domains and rated its wrongness. The results showed that Autonomy-violating situations resulted in a greater number of “errors” (i.e., classified into an unintended domain) compared to the other ethical violations, regardless of the place of origin for both Japanese and American participants. In addition, both Japanese and American participants were generally more accurate when categorizing home-generated (vs. foreign-generated) situations, particularly when they involved the Community ethic. On average, participants gave more intense ratings of wrongness to situations generated by members of their same culture. The own-culture advantage was most consistent for the Community ethic. Violations of the Community ethic may have the most robust and shared within-group interpretation because this promotes an adaptive fit into one’s own culture.
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Notes
The sphericity assumption for the variable of ethic was violated, Mauchly’s W(2) = .87, p < .001, so the Greenhouse–Geisser adjustment is reported here.
The Greenhouse–Geisser adjustment is reported here to correct for violation of the sphericity assumption, Mauchly’s W(2) = .78, p < .001.
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Acknowledgements
The authors thank Phylicia Hardy, Ariel Kershner, Kayla Sansevere for their assistance in data collection.
Funding
The present study was supported by Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research (Grant Nos. 1503446, 18H01078) from Japan Society for the Promotion of Science granted to the fourth author.
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Matsuo, A., Brown, C.M., Norasakkunkit, V. et al. How can I become a member of my culture?: shared representations of community-related moral violation in Japan and the U.S.. Cult. Brain 8, 96–115 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40167-019-00084-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40167-019-00084-z