Morality is in the cultural eye of the beholder: A situation sampling study

Shweder et al. proposed the three dimensions of morality: Autonomy, Community, and Divinity. Moral judgment often involves contexts, which is the social aspect of morality. This study explored how Japanese and American people interpret situations representing moral violations provided by their own cultural context and another cultural context, using the situation sampling method. Specifically, we tested whether participants in one culture view given moral violation situations as the violations of their culturally congruent dimension more frequently and feel more wrong towards the situations, compared to the culturally incongruent dimension. Also, unique to the situation sampling method, the extent of evocation caused by home and foreign culture was investigated. This study asked 102 Japanese and 168 American participants to judge which ethic would be mainly involved in each of the situations and to rate the wrongness of each situation. We found that perceived categorizations of moral violations as the Community ethic were most frequently observed across cultures. However, participants showed a higher level of perceived intensity of violations of culturally valued ethic provided by ingroup members than by foreign members. Cross-cultural differences in morality and future directions that morality research could go in, focusing on the Divinity ethic, were discussed.