engleski

Structure of virtues in the natural language in relation to the Moral Foundations Theory

In order to explore the possibility of cultural universals in the structure of virtues, and to investigate the relation of cross-culturally derived virtue structures, we employed the Lexical approach that was previously shown to be extremely valuable in both personality and virtues structure research. Furthermore, we used the lexically derived virtues structures to examine the proposition of the existence of certain evolved moral foundations, as suggested by the Moral Foundations Theory. MFT proposes the existence of six distinct moral foundations- Harm/Care, Fairness/cheating, Liberty/oppression Loyalty/betrayal, Authority/subversion and Sanctity/degradation, which was developed though simultaneous review of current evolutionary views on morality and cross-cultural research on virtues. However the evidence for the existence of such structure in various cultures has not been adequately investigated. After extracting virtues descriptors from the natural language in Croatia, 324 adjectives were rated for self and peer descriptions by a large sample of (N=500) University of Zagreb students and their best acquaintances. The lexically acquired structure in Croatian language was compared with the lexical virtues structures from Dutch and English language, as well as the proposed moral foundations as measured by the Moral Foundations Questionnaire. Discussed is the underlying structure of virtues in Croatian language, the comparison of cross-culturally derived lexical structures as well as the relations with the dimensions proposed by the MFT.

virtues; natural language; Moral Foundations Theory; lexical approach

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