Moral concerns through the lens of culture: Responding to intergroup-level authority decisions
We consider cultural differences in how moral concerns can shape responses to intergroup- level authority decisions – that is, decisions that allocate outcomes between different groups. We hypothesised that at the individual level, moral foundations may predict how people respond to authority decisions that either favour or disfavour their group, and that this relationship would be different depending on culture. The extent to which those values lead to the expected responses to authority decisions was investigated in two samples of students in Northern Ireland and Malaysia (N = 318). Participants read about two government decisions to distribute prestigious internships between their own and another university (in favouring or disfavouring ratios) and responded to scales measuring their decision acceptance and perceptions of fairness. We found that moral concern for authority - but not loyalty or fairness - predicted how students responded to authority decisions. However, cultural context moderated this effect. For Malaysian students, higher moral concern for authority predicted less preference for the pro-ingroup authority decision, whereas for the Northern Irish sample, the reverse was true. Thus, we demonstrate that the understanding of values is culture-specific and can translate to the opposing behaviours, depending on the context.