Alfano Mark, Cheong Marc, Curry Oliver Scott
Macquarie University, Australia.
University of Melbourne, Australia.
Heliyon. 2024 Feb 10;10(6):e25940. doi: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2024.e25940. eCollection 2024 Mar 30.
What is the cross-cultural prevalence of the seven moral values posited by the theory of "morality-as-cooperation"? Previous research, using laborious hand-coding of ethnographic accounts of ethics from 60 societies, found examples of most of the seven morals in most societies, and observed these morals with equal frequency across cultural regions. Here we replicate and extend this analysis by developing a new Morality-as-Cooperation Dictionary (MAC-D) and using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) to machine-code ethnographic accounts of morality from an additional 196 societies (the entire Human Relations Area Files, or HRAF, corpus). Again, we find evidence of most of the seven morals in most societies, across all cultural regions. The new method allows us to detect minor variations in morals across region and subsistence strategy. And we successfully validate the new machine-coding against the previous hand-coding. In light of these findings, MAC-D emerges as a theoretically-motivated, comprehensive, and validated tool for machine-reading moral corpora. We conclude by discussing the limitations of the current study, as well as prospects for future research.
“道德即合作”理论所提出的七种道德价值观的跨文化普遍性如何？以往的研究通过对60个社会的民族志伦理描述进行费力的手工编码，在大多数社会中发现了七种道德中的大多数例子，并在不同文化区域以相同的频率观察到这些道德。在此，我们通过开发一个新的“道德即合作词典”（MAC-D），并使用语言调查与字数统计（LIWC）对另外196个社会（整个人际关系区域档案，即HRAF语料库）的民族志道德描述进行机器编码，来复制并扩展这一分析。同样，我们在所有文化区域的大多数社会中发现了七种道德中的大多数证据。这种新方法使我们能够检测出不同地区和生存策略下道德的细微差异。并且我们成功地将新的机器编码与之前的手工编码进行了验证。鉴于这些发现，MAC-D成为一种基于理论、全面且经过验证的机器阅读道德语料库的工具。我们通过讨论当前研究的局限性以及未来研究的前景来结束本文。
