Emma E. Buchtel

Associate Dean (International Engagement) and Associate Professor (Psychology)
Department of Psychology, Faculty of Education and Human Development
The Education University of Hong Kong

Dr. Emma E. Buchtel is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology and Associate Dean (International Engagement) of the Faculty of Education and Human Development at the Education University of Hong Kong. She earned her PhD in cultural psychology from the University of British Columbia, and her B.A. from Yale University. Between her degrees, she spent four years in China. Dr. Buchtel’s primary areas of research include moral concepts, values, motivation and reasoning styles, with a particular emphasis on cross-cultural investigations and their implications for Western psychological theories. She is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and holds leadership positions in the Asian Association for Social Psychology and the International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology. Her recent research uses linguistic and psychophysiological methods to measure cultural differences in moral cognition, and has developed interventions to increase cross-cultural “wise moral tolerance.”

Keynote Address

Title

“Moral” cognition or “Virtue” cognition? Chinese and Western lay moral concepts and their implications for moral psychology

Abstract

What is the meaning of morality in Chinese and Western lay cognition—and what can it tell us about human morality? I will argue that the psychological study of “moral” cognition has been overly influenced by researchers’ own Western cultural backgrounds— a likely example of “insidious, un-recognized infection by the vernacular” (Fiske, 2020, p. 109). Definitions of moral norms as involving categorical obligation and an emphasis on harm and fairness are too close to the lay prototype of English-speakers, and distant from the lay prototype of morality of Chinese-speakers. Perhaps due to the relative salience of cultivated and benevolent virtues in Confucian-influenced cultures, versus moral absolutes and avoidance of sin in Judeo-Christian influenced cultures, Chinese moral cognition focuses more on the enactment of appropriate, cultivated behavior while Western moral concepts emphasize following universal principles.

I’ll first describe detailed lay prototypes of “immoral” (“Budaode”) behavior in Chinese and English. Factor analyses of indigenously generated behaviors suggested five to eight emic factors in USA, Hong Kong, and mainland Chinese data. The USA factors showed a strong emphasis on extreme harm and unfair behavior, while the Chinese factors included only mildly harmful behavior and emphasized uncivilized, unhygienic, and disrespectful behaviors. Moreover, when laypeople were asked to explain why behaviors were wrong (both indigenously generated behaviors, and behaviors drawn from the Moral Foundations), Americans curiously emphasized harmfulness across all types of behaviors, while Chinese participants’ explanations were more diverse, domain-specific, and likely to refer to virtues. In Chinese contexts, the complementarity of Confucian moral teachings vs. criminal law may help explain this difference.

If content is so different, what, then, makes “Budaode” behaviors about “morality?” Moral norm violations may pose a unique challenge to one’s sense of how the world works. I’ll describe studies comparing Chinese and British participants’ reaction time and pupil dilation to others’ norm-violating opinions about Harmful behaviors, uncivilized and unfilial (“Budaode”) behaviors, or Aesthetic judgements. Chinese Mainland participants show no significant difference between the Budaode and Harmful categories, while UK participants react more quickly to the Harmful category, and Hong Kong participants fall in between. These studies suggest that for mainland Chinese, strange opinions on harmful and uncultivated behaviors both violate expectations in a different way than strange aesthetic judgements do. Morality, then, may be especially linked to our sense of meaning.

How about we study “virtue psychology?” The ill-fittedness of Budaode to Western assumptions about moral cognition helps us attend to something else: moral character. Western-style psychology of moral cognition, i.e. absolutist, black-and-white moral judgement, may be a cultural curiosity and not a universally salient way of dividing up and regulating socially undesirable behaviors. Chinese morality may be less about absolute principles, and more about virtues. An interest in moral character is also known in psychology research from WEIRD societies, but less emphasized compared to moral judgment. Virtue cognition may be another human universal that is worthy of more study.