How does culture shape our moral identity? Moral foundations in Saudi Arabia and Britain

Abstract

North American measures of moral identity (MI) assume that caring and fairness are the most prototypical features of morality. Moral foundations theory describes such individualising foundations of morality as dominant in individualist cultures and binding foundations of morality as more particular to collectivist cultures. We weighed the criticism that moral identity scales are guilty of “liberal ethnocentrism” in two studies drawing on participants in the UK and Saudi Arabia. Only individualising traits were prototypical of concepts of moral people in Britain, while individualising and binding traits were both prototypical of such concepts in Saudi Arabia (Study 1, N = 160). In Study 2 (N = 539), participants completed the moral identity scale following typical instructions that referred to the prototypical traits of one of five moral foundations. Overall MI scores were lower in Britain than in Saudi Arabia, particularly when instructions described binding traits as characteristics of a moral person. Cross‐cultural differences were mediated by the perceived cultural importance attributed to these traits, particularly binding traits. These results justify concerns that existing moral identity scales underestimate important cultural variation in conceptualising moral identity, but justice and caring concerns remain the best single candidates for a universal foundation of human morality.

Malay Version of Moral Identity Scale: A Cross-Cultural Validation In Malaysian Youth

“…The original English version of the Moral Identity Scale was translated into Malay language version (through forwards and backward technique) to cater to the cross-cultural issue that may arise in order to avoid any cultural-related bias such as misinterpretation of meaning in a different language. 17 Malay language is an official spoken language of Malay people and is usually used by other Malaysians too like Chinese, Indian, and other Malaysian minorities. The Malay language is declared as the first language in Malaysia due to the large percentage of the Malay population (almost 50% of the entire population) in Malaysia.…”

Between cultural relativism and liberal ethnocentrism: What does Saudi Arabia tell us about cultural variation in moral identity and prejudice?

“…We examined both subscales, since previous research has identified that the internalization subscale is more predictive of moral outcomes than the symbolization subscale, and the symbolization subscale may even have a negative relationship with moral behavior Reed et al, 2007;Reynolds & Ceranic, 2007). Informed by our previous findings of different constructions of morality, we constructed a new measure; the Moral Variations and Moral Identity (MVMI) scale (AlSheddi et al, 2020). Unlike the SIMI, this scale examines the importance of moral identity in relation to all five of the moral foundations (see Methods for further details).…”

Morality-Based Assertion and Homophily on Social Media: A Cultural Comparison Between English and Japanese Languages

“…The degree of endorsement to these five dimensions may vary from one individual to another (Lifton, 1985), which has often been linked with cultural diversity (Jia and Krettenauer, 2017). This cultural diversity enables the existence of humans with different beliefs and values (AlSheddi et al, 2020).…”

“…Several researchers have focused on studying morality across different cultures based on moral dilemmas (following one moral value results in violating another, Awad et al, 2018), moral identity (level of importance of moral values to a person's identity, AlSheddi et al, 2020), and moral concerns (level of concern toward being right or wrong, Vasquez et al, 2001). A large online experiment was conducted (Awad et al, 2018) across more than 200 countries to capture the essential moral preferences, to be used in the design of new-age machines, such as autonomous vehicles and self-driving cars.…”

“…The experiments indicated the morality-based cultural differences, as the responses from all the countries could be divided into three different cultures (or clusters); Western (e.g., the United States), Eastern (e.g., Japan), and Southern (e.g., France). AlSheddi et al (2020) compared the moral identity of two diverse cultures, Islamic and English, specifically between people from Saudi Arabia and Britain. The two moral attributes of care and justice were found to be equally important for participants of both countries.…”