Koreans and Americans were compared in terms of political ideology and moral attitudes. The pattern found among U.S. participants is that liberals rated moral concerns about harm and unfairness higher than Korean conservatives, but conservatives rated moral concerns about betrayals of the ingroup and violations of social hierarchies and physical/spiritual purity higher. Compared with U.S. data (in which concerns about purity and disgust showed the strongest relation to ideology), Korean data revealed higher purity concerns overall, and a weaker relationship between purity concerns and ideology. Results suggested that while the patterns of ideological difference in moral concerns are the same, the magnitude of the differences depends upon the particular histories, traditions, and socioecological factors of these different cultures. They also emphasize a consistent pattern of overall moral structure: liberals discounted concerns related to group cohesiveness (rating them at best "slightly relevant") and rated only individualistic concerns as "somewhat" to "very" relevant, while conservatives rated all moral concerns in the latter range, nearly equating individual and group moral concerns.

Two sets of explanations for the liberal-conservative political orientation developed and tested in the U.S. were compared and tested with Korean data. The two sets of explanations are (1) Moral Foundations Theory that states that liberals and conservatives have different moral intuitions (Haidt and Graham, Soc Justice Res 20:98-116, 2007) and(2) a theory that cognitive needs to manage uncertainty and threat are the main factors behind the political orientation (Jost et al., Psychol Bull 129:339-375, 2003). These two sets of explanation for political orientation were tested and supported empirically in the U.S. The Korean data showed clear support for the Moral Foundations Theory. Compared to conservatives, liberals in South Korea agreed more with individual oriented moral statements and less with community oriented moral statements. The data showed weak support for the uncertainty and threat explanation in that conservatives showed higher level of intolerance to ambiguity and higher level of death anxiety, but the correlations are weak. Implications of these findings were discussed.

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