Matsuo, A., & Brown, C. M. (2022).
Culture and Brain, 10(2), 113–139.
Abstract
The present work reviews moral judgment from the perspective of culture. Culture is a dynamic system of human beings interacting with their environment, and morality is both a product of this system and a means of maintaining it. When members of a culture engage in moral judgment, they communicate their “social morality” and gain a reputation as a productive member who contributes to the culture’s prosperity. People in different cultures emphasize different moral domains, which is often understood through the individualism-collectivism distinction that is widely utilized in cultural psychology. However, traditional morality research lacks the interactive perspective of culture, where people communicate with shared beliefs about what is good or bad. As a consequence, past work has had numerous limitations and even potential confounds created by methodologies that are grounded in the perspective of WEIRD (i.e., Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic) cultures. Great attention should be paid to the possibly misleading assumption that researchers and participants share the same understanding of the stimuli. We must address this bias in sampling and in the minds of researchers and better clarify the concept of culture in intercultural morality research. The theoretical and practical findings from research on culture can then contribute to a better understanding of the mechanisms of moral judgment.
The article is paywalled. So, I tried to give more of a summary. Here it is:
This article discusses moral judgment from a cultural perspective. The authors argue that morality is a product of culture and helps to maintain it. They claim that people from different cultures emphasize different moral domains, which is often understood using the individualism-collectivism distinction. The authors also suggest that traditional morality research lacks an interactive perspective of culture, where people communicate shared beliefs about what is good or bad, and that this past research has had limitations and potential confounds due to methodologies that are grounded in WEIRD cultures.
The authors discuss theories of moral judgment, including Lawrence Kohlberg’s theory of stages of moral development, the social intuitionist model, and moral pluralism. They claim that moral judgment is a complex process involving self-recognition, social cognition, and decision-making and that the brain is designed to process multiple moralities in different ways. They also explore the social function of morality, stating that behaving morally according to the standards of one’s group helps people be included in the group, and moral norms are used to identify desirable and undesirable group membership.
In a significant part of the article, the authors discuss the concept of culture, defining it as a structured system of making sense of the environment, which shapes individuals in order to fit into their environment. They explain that the need to belong is a basic human motivation, and people form groups as a means of survival and reproduction. Norms applied to a particular group regulate group members’ behaviors, and culture emerges from these norms. The authors use the individualism-collectivism dimension, a common concept in cultural psychology, to explain how people from different cultures perceive and interpret the world in different ways. They claim that culture is a dynamic interaction between humans and their environment and that moral judgment achieves its social function because people assume that ingroup members share common representations of what is right or wrong.
