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The effects of culture and moral foundations on moral judgments: The ethics of authority mediates the relationship between power distance and attitude towards lying to one’s supervisor

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Abstract

We tested whether moral judgments in a cross-cultural setting are related to both culture and moral foundations. Our objective was to verify if the relationship between cultural power distance and moral judgment of both egoistic and other-oriented lies told to one’s supervisor is mediated by adherence to the ethics of authority. We analyzed data from Mexican, Spanish, Estonian, Dutch, Swedish, and Polish respondents (N = 1176). The hypothesized mediation effects were found to be significant: higher power distance entailed more negative moral judgments. Power distance was positively related to the ethics of authority, which was in turn related to harsher moral judgments. When we controlled for the influence of the ethics of authority, power distance was no longer related to moral judgments.

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Notes

  1. The entire project was conducted on 1482 participants. However, in the first part of the project we showed that egoistic lies regarding professional and private life merged into one factor in Ireland (Cantarero et al. 2018). To be able to better answer the research question for the second part of the project described in this paper, we excluded data from Ireland in the analysis, which resulted in the analyzed sample consisting of 1176 participants.

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Acknowledgements

This project was conducted thanks to research grant awarded to Katarzyna Cantarero by the National Science Centre in Poland. The grant title was ‘Cross-cultural differences in the acceptance of lying in view of the Moral Foundations Theory’, no. UMO-2011/01/N/HS6/02211.

Research presented in this paper was part of Katarzyna Cantarero doctoral thesis. We would like to thank Hillie Aaldering, Wijnand Van Tilburg, Eric Igou, Andero Teras and other friends and colleagues that helped in reaching participants. We thank Katarzyna Byrka for her valuable comments on this work.

Funding

This study was funded by the National Science Centre in Poland (grant number UMO-2011/01/N/HS6/02211).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Faculty in Sopot, ul. Polna 16/20, 81-745, Sopot, Poland

    Katarzyna Cantarero

  2. Institute of Psychology, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland

    Katarzyna Cantarero & Piotr Szarota

  3. University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands

    Eftychia Stamkou

  4. University of Almeria, Centro de Estudio de las Migraciones y las Relaciones Interculturales (CEMyRI), Almería, Spain

    Marisol Navas

  5. Universidad Iberoamericana, Ciudad de México, Mexico

    Alejandra del Carmen Dominguez Espinosa

Authors
  1. Katarzyna Cantarero
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  2. Piotr Szarota
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  3. Eftychia Stamkou
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  4. Marisol Navas
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  5. Alejandra del Carmen Dominguez Espinosa
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Katarzyna Cantarero.

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Conflict of Interest

On behalf of all authors, the corresponding author states that there is no conflict of interest.

Ethical Approval

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

Informed Consent

Informed consent was obtained from all participants engaged in the study.

Appendix 1

Appendix 1

Stories depicting work-related lying and the instruction used in the study. All the stories that proved to be most representative and allowed to confirm the four factorial structure of lying acceptability are presented in Cantarero et al. (2018, pp. 234–235). Denomination of the type of each lie is in parenthesis (this information was not given to participants).

Presented below are various social situations. Please take a stance on each of them by ticking the extent to which you think the presented behavior can be characterized by a given expression.

On a message from person B (superior of persons A and C) that person C made an error at work, person A tells person B, that person C made ​​the mistake because he/she was not informed about new guidelines, even though person A knows that person C was aware of them. (other-oriented, professional domain)

Person A tells person B (superior of persons A and person C) that person C went to the toilet, even though in fact person C was late to work. (other-oriented, professional domain)

Person A calls to person B (his/her supervisor) and tells him/her that he/she is not feeling well and will not come to work, even though in reality he/she feels good. (egoistic, professional domain)

Person A knows that in order to obtain the possibility of executing a task, which he/she is really counting on, he/she must be skilled in a particular field. He/she says to person B (his/her supervisor) that he/she is skilled in this field even though he/she knows he/she is not as skilled, as he/she claims. (egoistic, professional domain)

Person A informs person B (his/her supervisor) about successes, which in fact he/she did not achieve. (egoistic, professional domain)

Person A tells person B (his/her supervisor), that person C is a co-author of a project, of which person C was supposed to take part in, although in reality person C did not take part in it. (other-oriented, professional domain)

Person A tells person B (supervisor of person A and person C) about the successes of person C, even though he/she knows that he/she did not achieve them. (other-oriented, professional domain)

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Cantarero, K., Szarota, P., Stamkou, E. et al. The effects of culture and moral foundations on moral judgments: The ethics of authority mediates the relationship between power distance and attitude towards lying to one’s supervisor. Curr Psychol 40, 675–683 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-018-9945-0

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