2024/02/10 by Mark Alfano, Marc Cheong, Oliver Scott Curry · 1 voice · 2 citations
Neuroscience · Psychology · Social Sciences · #Cultural Differences and Values #Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment #Social and Intergroup Psychology
paper · pdf · doi:10.1016/j.heliyon.2024.e25940
openalex publication_date 2024/02/10 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/23
What is the cross-cultural prevalence of the seven moral values posited by the theory of "morality-as-cooperation"? Previous research, using laborious hand-coding of ethnographic accounts of ethics from 60 societies, found examples of most of the seven morals in most societies, and observed these morals with equal frequency across cultural regions. Here we replicate and extend this analysis by developing a new Morality-as-Cooperation Dictionary (MAC-D) and using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) to machine-code ethnographic accounts of morality from an additional 196 societies (the entire Human Relations Area Files, or HRAF, corpus). Again, we find evidence of most of the seven morals in most societies, across all cultural regions. The new method allows us to detect minor variations in morals across region and subsistence strategy. And we successfully validate the new machine-coding against the previous hand-coding. In light of these findings, MAC-D emerges as a theoretically-motivated, comprehensive, and validated tool for machine-reading moral corpora. We conclude by discussing the limitations of the current study, as well as prospects for future research.