How Morality Varies Across Cultures: Expanding Empathy Opens With the Question

How morality varies across cultures is not a pub argument. It is a measurement problem, and on Wednesday 4 November 2026 it opens a university lecture series. “Expanding Empathy 2026,” hosted through Penn State’s Consortium on Moral Decision-Making, begins with Mohammad Atari of the University of Massachusetts Amherst presenting “Morality Across Time and Space” — the first traditional in-person lecture in the series since 2020 (Penn State). Four discussions in November and December will examine morality, human behaviour and the future of empathy research.

Information verified through 4 November 2026.

How morality varies across cultures, in Atari’s own framing

Atari studies a simple discomfort. What feels obviously right in one place can feel deeply wrong in another place, or in the same place a century earlier.

“These influences change across cultures and generations, so what feels obviously right to us can feel deeply wrong to people raised in another place or time,” he said. “Studying those differences keeps us from mistaking our own moral backyard for human moral universals” (Penn State). His Culture and Morality Lab at UMass Amherst starts from the premise that human morality is not one thing: moral values can bind people together and sustain cooperation, and they can also divide people into “us” and “them,” justify violence and amplify conflict (UMass Amherst).

Penn State anthropologist Anne Pisor, who joins Atari for a public dialogue on 5 November, makes the companion point: notions of goodness and badness appear in cultures everywhere, but what counts as good and bad varies (Penn State). Psychologist Sean Laurent adds the methodological sting — many theories of morality were developed by Western researchers and tested on Western samples, so cross-cultural comparison is how you find out whether a theory describes humans or just the humans who were handy.

The moral foundations questionnaire and the split inside fairness

The best-known attempt to map that variation is Moral Foundations Theory, which proposed that cultures build their moralities on a small set of shared concerns: care, fairness, loyalty, authority and purity (PsyPost). Atari and colleagues tested that map against data from 25 populations and rebuilt the measuring tool. Their study, “Morality beyond the WEIRD,” rebuilt the tool as the Moral Foundations Questionnaire MFQ-2, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and it splits the old fairness foundation into two distinct foundations — equality and proportionality — while keeping care, loyalty, authority and purity (PsyPost).

That split is not bookkeeping. Equality says treat people the same. Proportionality says give people what their contribution earns. A workplace, a tax code and a family kitchen can honour one and violate the other on the same afternoon.

The cross-cultural results were uneven in instructive ways. Purity varied most strongly across cultures, with participants from less WEIRD — Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic — societies endorsing it more. Women scored higher on equality and purity; men scored higher on proportionality, loyalty and authority. Religious participants scored higher on loyalty, authority, purity and equality, while conservatives weighted loyalty, authority, purity and proportionality more heavily and liberals weighted care and equality more (PsyPost). The team’s own limit deserves repeating: despite data from 25 populations in seven languages, the results still rest on people educated enough to complete surveys online.

An empathy common lexicon, because researchers were not speaking one language

The series turns on 10 November to a prior problem: researchers cannot agree on what the word empathy covers. A virtual panel will bring together contributors to “What We Talk About When We Talk About Empathy: Toward a Common Lexicon of Empathy-Related Constructs,” published in September in Perspectives on Psychological Science by 15 authors (Penn State).

Panelist Mark Davis argues the proposed common lexicon could make the research “more transparent, less confusing and more impactful.” Brett Murphy wants the conversation widened to positive experience — how people respond to one another’s good news, joy and pride, not only to suffering. Greg Depow’s point is the austere one: be clear about the definition and scope of empathy before interpreting any result built on it (Penn State).

Series organiser C. Daryl Cameron, who founded Expanding Empathy in 2019, frames the public stakes plainly: people now debate publicly whether empathy is a sign of strength or weakness, and the consortium’s questions extend to “whether and how far we should extend our empathy” (Penn State). The series closes on 7 December with early-career researchers setting out where they think the field should go next.

Analysis: two moves in this programme matter more than any single finding. The first is treating variation as data rather than error — if purity organises moral life in one society and barely registers in another, a universal theory has to explain that spread, not average it away. The second is the lexicon work. A field that cannot say whether empathy means feeling with someone, understanding someone, or caring about someone will keep producing studies that appear to contradict each other while measuring different things. Naming the parts is slow, unglamorous philosophy. It is also the part everything else depends on.

Photo: JohnDziak, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Sources

1. https://www.psu.edu/news/rock-ethics-institute/story/expanding-empathy-series-explore-morality-empathy-and-future-research
2. https://www.psypost.org/decoding-morality-across-cultures-insights-from-a-mega-study-of-moral-foundations-theory/
3. https://www.umass.edu/psychological-brain-sciences/about/directory/mohammad-atari