Abstract:

Moral judgments and behaviors are highly sensitive to culture. The understanding and construction of the exact same moral issues can vary substantially across individuals who come from different cultural backgrounds or possess different levels of multicultural experiences. Social psychologists are increasingly interested in closely looking at human morality through the lens of culture, partly driven by a renaissance of cultural psychology in the 1980s and the broadening and deepening of globalization. Based upon the perspective of cultural psychology, we briefly summarize how particular cultural factors (e.g. geography, ecology, social class) influence individuals’ moral judgments and behaviors from three facets: between-culture variations, within-culture variations, and multiculturalism. Together, it is our hope that this review article will inspire future research to better understand how Chinese people’s moral patterns and value systems have changed and are changing in the context of rapid and deep cultural change in China.

Key words: moral judgments and behaviors, cultural variations, multicultural experiences