A cultural model of moral comportment in Chuuk: A study using cultural consensus theory.

Abstract

The recent moral and ethical turn in anthropology and psychology has generated renewed interest in whether normative models of morality and ethics are primarily found in forms of social discourse or in cognitive cultural models (or both) and whether these models are structured is culturally specific ways or by universal conceptual structures. This study uses cultural consensus theory (CCT) to provide useful insights into both questions. The study uses free list and successive pile-sort data collected in the islands of Chuuk Lagoon located in the western Pacific islands of Micronesia. It finds that there is a shared cognitive cultural model for the domain of moral comportment in Chuuk. Based on both a cluster analysis and multidimensional scaling of the estimated shared model, aspects of this model do reflect conceptual universals, specifically the five moral foundations identified in Jonathan Haidt's moral foundations theory and Tomasello's theory of the human ontogeny of morality. However, given that Chuuk is a cultural setting that emphasizes what Richard Shweder called the ethic of community culturally and institutionally, as opposed to either an ethic of autonomy or divinity, the most salient aspects of the model do reflect this local cultural emphasis.