Moral Intuitions and Political Orientation: Similarities and Differences between South Korea and the United States

Abstract

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.

Liberal–conservative self-identification in Korea: a cross-cultural explanation

“…The same finding was reported in Kim et al (2012). As discussed in that study, while liberals and conservatives in the U.S. showed the biggest difference in the Purity subscale among the five moral foundations, the Authority is the key factor in Korea.…”

“…Studies testing the moral foundations theory in the U.S. have shown that purity foundation is the strongest factor in predicting the political orientation. This difference was also found in Kim et al (2012). Table 1 also shows the zero-order correlation coefficients between the political ratings and 5 foundation scores which are all significant and in the expected directions.…”

“…It would be an interesting to further explore a possibility that Korean conservatives are less driven by fear and dislike of uncertainty. As discussed in Kim et al (2012), Korean political scientists have been argued that attitude toward North Korea was the biggest (perhaps the only) factor empirically shown to explain liberalconservative divide in Korea. Conservatives in Korea might be more sensitive to threats posed by North Korea than liberals and this might be a supportive evidence for the threat and uncertainty explanation.…”

“…Haidt and Graham (2007) called (1) and (2) individualizing foundations and (3) (4) and (5) binding foundations. Individualizing foundations are moral intuitions related to protecting individuals and respecting rights of other individuals; and binding foundations are moral intuitions related to binding individuals within groups and to strengthening groups and institutions (see also Kim et al 2012).…”

“…Kim et al (2012) study is probably the only study that tested the moral foundations theory with Korean participants in Korean language so far. The study showed that despite the cultural and historical differences, Koreans showed the similar pattern of data that supported the moral foundations theory.…”