Moral Expansiveness Around the World: The Role of Societal Factors Across 36 Countries

Abstract

What are the things that we think matter morally, and how do societal factors influence this? To date, research has explored several individual-level and historical factors that influence the size of our ‘moral circles.' There has, however, been less attention focused on which societal factors play a role. We present the first multi-national exploration of moral expansiveness—that is, the size of people’s moral circles across countries. We found low generalized trust, greater perceptions of a breakdown in the social fabric of society, and greater perceived economic inequality were associated with smaller moral circles. Generalized trust also helped explain the effects of perceived inequality on lower levels of moral inclusiveness. Other inequality indicators (i.e., Gini coefficients) were, however, unrelated to moral expansiveness. These findings suggest that societal factors, especially those associated with generalized trust, may influence the size of our moral circles.

The Relative Importance of Target and Judge Characteristics in Shaping the Moral Circle

“…We also found that neither religiosity nor nationality predicted differences in moral concern. The latter finding is in line with previous work showing that, in a much larger and more diverse sample of countries, cross‐country differences in moral concern were relatively small (Kirkland et al., 2022). However, we did identify a number of other judge characteristics that influenced moral concern.…”

“…Although we included participants from four different countries in our studies, it is important to note that all participants were sampled from WEIRD countries, limiting the generalizability of the results (Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010; Nielsen, Haun, Kärtner, & Legare, 2017). Much more work is needed to explore similarities and differences in people's moral circle across a larger and more diverse set of countries (see Awad et al., 2018; Kirkland et al., 2022).…”

“…Recent studies have found that children (Helenser Kozachenko & Piazza, 2021; McGuire et al., 2022; Reinecke et al., 2021; Wilks, Caviola, Kahane, & Bloom, 2021), women (Caviola et al., 2019; Graça, Manuela, Oliveira, & Milfont, 2018) and liberals (Waytz et al., 2019) appear to show more moral concern for others. Additionally, work by Crimston and colleagues (2016) on the Moral Expansiveness Scale showed that a range of psychological factors were associated with a wider moral circle, including empathic concern, compassion, identification with all of humanity, endorsement of certain moral foundations, fears of compassion, generalized trust, and beliefs about the “fabric of society” (see also Crimston, Blessing, Gilbert, & Kirby, 2022, Kirkland et al., 2022).…”

Social mindfulness predicts concern for nature and immigrants across 36 nations

“…Second, we gathered a number of individual-level and country-level measures that represent inclusive attitudes and moral obligation to protect others, including the environment. On the individual-level, the Moral Expansiveness Scale (MES) was used to assess the number of entities one does and does not have moral concern for as a broad indicator for inclusive attitudes towards others 34 , 35 . Participants were asked to rate their moral concern for entities such as family, outgroup members, animals and nature, and more entities included in one’s ‘moral circle’ 36 indicated greater moral expansiveness (α = .92).…”

Awe promotes moral expansiveness via the small-self

“…Moral expansiveness is a construct which aims to capture both the extent (number of entities) and depth (level of felt obligation or concern for specific entities) of a person's felt moral concern for a broad range of entities, and therefore the size of their moral worlds (Crimston et al, 2016(Crimston et al, , 2018a. While current work on moral expansiveness has focused on individual differences in the size of a person's moral world as associated with universal values or pro-social behavior (Crimston et al, 2016), or its relationship to relatively stable socio-ecological factors (e.g., income inequality; Kirkland et al, 2022), less work has focused on situational factors that may lead to changes in the expansiveness of a person's moral world.…”