Beyond the Moral Domain: The Normative Sense Among the Chinese

Renatas Berniūnas,Vytis Silius,Vilius Dranseika

doi:10.15388/psichol.2019.11

Abstract

In this paper we report a study on how different types of normatively relevant transgressions are evaluated by Chinese participants. We hypothesized that, given the continuing influences of Confucian worldview on contemporary Chinese societies, the Chinese will not make a distinction between moral (daode) and conventional norms of cultured behavior (wenming). Our results indicate that Chinese participants expressed a strong normative conviction not only towards harmful and unfair actions, usually subsumed under the moral domain in Western literature, but also towards violations of what would be widely accepted as conventional (or cultural) norms. Similarly, Chinese participants expressed a strong normative conviction towards violations of the traditional Chinese value of family reverence (xiao), thus further supporting our general thesis. Moreover, results indicate that, overall, explicit considerations of wenming (unculturedness) emerged as the best predictor of a normative conviction response among the Chinese. Though considerations of harm and fairness also emerged as significant predictors of normative conviction response. The results are discussed in the light of recent debates about the moral/conventional distinction and the scope of morality.

Highlights

There are two related debates in contemporary moral psychology
We suggested a tentative characterization of strong and weak normative convictions that can be preferentially elicited by various transgressions
There might be other ways to characterize normative convictions, but for the purposes of our study, we choose to adopt Turiel’s criteria. This way, the studies could be more or less comparable. As it was indicated in the methods section, there are two related, but conceptually separable attitudes – authority-independence and universality

Summary

Introduction

There are two related debates in contemporary moral psychology. Turiel and his colleagues drew on this philosophical tradition and integrated the distinction into their psychological research (Nucci & Turiel, 1978; Smetana, 1993; Tisak & Turiel, 1984; Turiel, Killen, & Helwig, 1987; Turiel, 1983; Yau & Smetana, 2003). Conventional transgressions, on the other hand, don’t have this signature. This distinction, it is argued, is a rather robust and universal psychological phenomenon that could be observed across different age groups and across different cultural or religious contexts (e.g., Nucci & Turiel, 1993; Yau & Smetana, 2003)

Methods

Results

Conclusion