According to a study, seven traits are considered moral by the whole world

British anthropologists say that helping your family, helping your group, giving favors, courage, deference to superiors, equitable distribution of resources and respect for the property of others are things that we all hold in common. valued. The results are based on a survey of 60 cultures around the world.

Universally loved

While previous research has examined moral rules at the local level, this study is the first to badyze them in a globally representative sample of societies. This is the largest and most comprehensive intercultural survey on morality ever conducted, write the authors. In total, the team badyzed the ethnographic accounts of ethical behaviors of 60 companies, including over 600,000 words from more than 600 sources.

"The debate between moral universalists and moral relativists has been raging for centuries, but we now have some answers," says Dr. Oliver Scott Curry, senior author and principal investigator at the Institute of Cognitive Anthropology and scalable.

"Around the world, people face a similar set of social problems and use a similar set of moral rules to solve them. As expected, these seven moral rules seem to be universal in all cultures. Everyone shares a common moral code. Everyone agrees that cooperating and promoting the common good is the right thing to do. "

One of the theories that this study is testing is that morality has evolved to promote cooperation within a group. According to this theory, as a group can work together in many different ways, there must be many behaviors that people consider moral or ethical.

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The team looked at the seven morality models I mentioned earlier. The team explains: "The allocation of resources to parents; coordination for mutual benefit; social exchange; and conflict resolution. "

The selection of parents makes us feel obliged to take care of our family and avoid incestual relationships. Coordination for mutual benefit pushes us to form groups and value solidarity and loyalty. Social exchange depends on our ability to trust others, return the favour, feel guilt and gratitude, make amends and forgive. Finally, conflict resolution explains why we are engaged in expensive screens such as courage and generosity give back to our superiors, Try settle disputes fairly, and respect the property of others.

The authors found that these seven cooperative behaviors were universally considered morally good. More importantly, the team found no company in which none of them was considered morally wrong. Finally, the team writes that they have been described as ethical on all continents with a more or less equal frequency – in other words, they were not exclusive to a single region.

Among Amhara, "the non-respect of the obligation of kinship is considered as a shameful deviation, indicating a perverse character," she writes, while Korea developed an "ethics of egalitarian community [of] mutual badistance and cooperation between neighbors [and] strong solidarity within the group. "Garo society attaches great importance to reciprocity" at every stage of life. [life]"And it occupies" a very high place in the social structure of Garo's values ​​". The Masai people still holds in high esteem "those who cling to warlike virtues", with the ideal of a warlike world resting on "ascetic commitment to oneself. -sacrifice […] in the heat of battle, as a supreme demonstration of courageous loyalty. "

The Bemba have a deep respect for their elders and authority, while the ideal of justice Kapauku is called "uta-uta, half-half", whose meaning is very close to what we call the equity. And among the Tarahumara, "respect for the property of others is the keystone of all interpersonal relationships," they also write.

While cultures and societies around the world viewed these seven elements as fundamental moral rules, the team found variations in their rankings. The team plans to collect data on modern moral values ​​in the future, in order to badess the impact of differences in moral ranking on cooperation in various social conditions.

"Our study was based on historical descriptions of cultures from around the world," says co-author Harvey Whitehouse. "These data were collected before and independently of the development of the theories we were testing"

"Future work will test the finer predictions of theory by gathering new data, even more systematically, in the field."

"We hope this research will help promote mutual understanding between people of different cultures. an appreciation of what we have in common, and how and why we differ, "adds Curry.

Paper, "Is it good to cooperate? To test the theory of moral cooperation in 60 societies "was published in the journal Current anthropology.

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