Editorial: Culture and morality: things we value

Abstract

Historically, culture and morality were largely conceptualized from a Western perspective: the moral subject was regarded as an independent self with the right to free choice, largely unrestrained by environmental and social demands, while the socially constructed nature of the self and the common good of community members were often ignored (Sandel, 1982(Sandel, /1998)).Moreover, as the world at large moved from rural/traditional communities to more urban/modern societies, values on individual rights and free choice-and with these, individualistic and liberal moral foundations (e.g., care and fairness)-became more prized and even clashed against the norms of social responsibility and conservative moral foundations (like loyalty and authority), which were frequently overlooked (Greenfield, 2009;Haidt, 2007). But with the advent of cultural psychology cam increasing calls for research attention to alternative cultural norms and moral practices that took into account geographical and temporal variations.In recent years, a growing body of research on ecological diversity (Oishi et al., 2014), social class (Grossmann & Varnum, 2011), religions (Cohen, Wu, & Miller, 2016), and social change (Varnum & Grossmann 2017) has updated our conception of culture to expand beyond merely race or ethnicity in order to make room for additional forms of culture. A number of studies in this Special Topics issue "Culture and Morality: The Things We Value" highlight the potent role of socioecological context (e.g., ethnicity, ideology, wealth) as macro-level predictors (Chen-Xia et al., 2024;Grigoryev et al., 2024;Taku & Arai, 2024;Tanaka, Zheng, & Ishii, 2023) and socioeconomic status as micro-level predictors of participants' behaviors (Hu et al., 2024;Wu et al., 2024;Zhang et al., 2024), along with the role of the target being perceived (Lin et al., 2024). Additionally, one of the most interesting aspects of culture-that also makes it more difficult to study and document-is its dynamic nature. Indeed, one of the newer topics of interest to cultural psychologists in recent years has been the issue of cultural change: what it looks like, when/where it happens, and how we can track it (e.g., Ericksson et al., 2024).Alongside these developments within the field of cultural psychology, moral psychology has also shifted from merely documenting cultural differences in what we value to more mechanistic questions of how and why these variations exist. Cultural researchers have long argued that morality can be divided into three major domains: community code, autonomy code, and divinity code (e.g., Kollareth & Russell, 2017;Shweder et al., 1997). The community code involves people's responsibilities within specific groups and take into account forces like social class or status, interdependence, and perceived duties or obligations among group members. In contrast, the autonomy code views individuals as independent and self-governing agents who are mainly concerned with individual rights and social justice. The divinity code pertains to sacred orders and norms derived from religion, including concerns like the maintenance of purity when it comes to both body and soul. While Western moral psychology research has historically focused on the domain of autonomy when it comes to morality, cross-cultural studies have broadened the scope of moral psychology research to include these additional domains. Since its inception, Haidt and colleagues (2007) further subdivided these original three moral codes into five moral foundations: Care/Harm, Fairness/Cheating, Loyalty/Betrayal, Authority/Subversion, and Purity/Degradation (Graham et al., 2011). Furthermore, recent works on moral foundations pointed to the lack of measurement invariance of the above five-factor model, especially in non-WEIRD societies (e.g., in Iran), and proposed a six-factor model of moral foundations in which equality and proportionality, as the distinct manifestations of fairness (with the form