Moral Boundaries Across Societies

• In Event: 4354 - Social Psychology

Abstract

Sociological work on boundaries (e.g., Lamont and Molnár 2002) has become increasingly influential, informing subfields ranging from culture to race and ethnicity to organizational studies. This paper seeks to augment that work through a deeper engagement with relevant social psychology, drawing on a novel measure to examine ‘moral boundaries’ (Lamont 1992) as they are shaped by cultural and structural factors across four distinct nations. Building on recent sociological engagement with the cross-cultural properties of measuring values (Miles 2015; Longest et al., 2013), we incorporate a novel measure based on a well-established cross-cultural research program to outline a demography of perceptions of moral boundaries with valued in- and out-groups in different societies. This allows us to begin to look for universal vs. cultural patterns in the content of moral boundaries and what precise values are perceived to be the differentiating factor between these putative in- and out-groups. The focus on moral boundaries assumes ‘morality’ for the in-group. The criteria for that are sometimes explicated (e.g., Lamont 2000), but more often assumed, similar to the way morality, itself, gets asserted with little interrogation (Hitlin and Vaisey 2013). We attempt a broader exploration of the content underlying in-group moral definition across cultures.

Authors

• Steven Hitlin, University of Iowa

• Hye Won Kwon, University of Iowa