Cultural conceptions of morality: Examining laypeople’s associations of moral character

Abstract

Whether moral conceptions are universal or culture-specific is controversial in moral psychology. One option is to refrain from imposing theoretical constraints and to ask laypeople from different cultures how they conceptualize morality. Our article adopts this approach by examining laypeople’s associations of moral character in individualistic- and collectivistic-oriented cultures. Using correspondence analysis we found that the concept of moral character yielded widely shared associations with justice and welfare concerns. Yet, there were also clear cultural differences with individualistic-oriented samples associating more frequently rights-based features and collectivistic-oriented samples more frequently associating duty-based attributes. When matching freelisted trait categories with Schwartz’s value types, moral value hierarchies were similar across cultures and correlated significantly with explicit moral value ratings. We conclude that imposing constraints through an expert-designed category system can narrow the scope of inquiry to common moral aspects related to problem-solving, promotion of prosocial actions and control of antisocial behaviour.