Moral foundations, moral identity, and moral behaviour : a cross-cultural comparison

Abstract EN

Moral foundations theory (Graham et al., 2009) suggests that moral norms can be classified into five foundations: Care, Justice, Loyalty, Authority, and Purity.

While these five moral foundations have been found for people’s moral judgments, it is not clear whether they would also hold for actual moral behavior.

We investigated in two experiments whether foundation-related moral behavior and deception was affected by moral judgment and moral identity in a cross-cultural context comparing adults from the UK and Saudi Arabia.

In the first study, no cross-cultural differences were found between the two samples concerning moral judgment and behaviour in the care and justice foundations.

Furthermore, no cultural differences were found between the two samples concerning moral behaviour in the five foundations.

In the second study, deception was not correlated significantly with the five foundations and moral sensitivity across both cultural samples.

However, culture moderated the relationship between deception and moral judgment in harm and authority moral foundations.

Findings show that moral identity mediated the relationship between moral judgment and costly moral behaviour.

However, deception was not affected by moral sensitivity or moral judgment at all.

The different pattern of results could be attributed to the conceptualization of moral duties.