Perceived Justifiability Towards Morally Debatable Behaviors Across Europe
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Perceived Justifiability Towards Morally Debatable Behaviors Across Europe Marco Marozzi1 Accepted: 6 September 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Scientific interest in studying justifiability towards morally debatable behaviors across nations is considerable, but the statistical assessment of the issue has not been very rigorous so far. In fact, many authors measure the related constructs computing composite indicators of justifiability as unweighed averages of perceived justifiability towards morally debatable behaviors. Other than not allowing for different weights, another drawback is that even if the items have different variability, no transformation like the z score is typically applied before computing the average. Another major shortcoming of the available justifiability indexes is the lack of robustness analysis of the results, making their message weak. The aim of this paper is to design very general composite indicators of justifiability towards dishonest-illegal and personal-sexual behaviors without the shortcomings of the other indicators. The indexes are computed for a data set from the European Values Study covering 47 countries and regions. The results show that Sweden, Netherlands and Finland are the most permissive countries towards personal-sexual behaviors followed by other Western and Scandinavian countries, whereas the strictest countries are Kosovo and Turkey. The most permissive countries towards dishonest-illegal behaviors are all ex-communist countries with Belarus and Slovak Republic being the most permissive countries whereas the strictest ones are Northern Cyprus and Turkey. Keywords Composite indicator · Societal looseness–tightness · Cross-cultural differences · Uncertainty analysis · Monte Carlo methods
1 Introduction Research on cultural and moral tightness is very active and the interest is growing. A Google Scholar search (December 2019) for “cultural tightness” returns 1550 entries of which 855 in the past 5 years. Morality makes group living easier by regulating certain behaviors that are personally advantageous but negatively affect the welfare of others or violate their rights (Vauclair 2010). Without a common moral sense it would be difficult for members of a social group to develop social cooperation to improve group welfare. See * Marco Marozzi [email protected] 1
Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Venice, Italy
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Pittel and Mendelsohn (1966) for a review of practical studies on moral values until the mid 1960’s. Cross-cultural studies using scales where respondents were asked to evaluate certain behaviors in terms of their rightness or wrongness begun in the 1970’s. Since the 1980’s, much research has been done using data from the European and World Value survey using different sets of items from the Morally Debatable Behaviors Scale (Harding and Phillips 1986) about the perceived justifiability towards behaviors reflecting moral issues. A related research field is about cultural and moral looseness–tightness and refe
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