Development and Validation of the Purity Orientation-Pollution Avoidance Scale: A Study With Japanese Sample

Verification of the Japanese Version of Greene’s Moral Dilemma Task’s Validity and Reliability

The moral dilemma task developed by Greene et al., which comprises personal and impersonal moral dilemmas, is useful for clarifying people’s moral judgments. This study develops and validates a Japanese version of this questionnaire. Ten new questions were added to the Japanese version using back-translation, and its internal validity was tested. A second survey was conducted among the same participants one month after the first survey (n = 231). The intraclass correlation coefficient through retesting was found to be 0.781. Test-retest, internal consistency, and criterion-related validity were confirmed by retesting the Japanese version of the moral dilemma task. Moral judgments differed in gender, with women and men tending to be more utilitarian in situations where emotions were less and more likely to be involved, respectively. The association between age and deontological moral judgments was also observed.

The sanctity of life: The role of purity in attitudes towards abortion and euthanasia

Although abortion and euthanasia are highly contested issues at the heart of the culture war, the moral foundations underlying ideological differences on these issues are mostly unknown. Given that much of the extant debate is framed around the sanctity of life, we argued that the moral foundation of purity/sanctity-a core moral belief that emphasises adherence to the "natural order"-would mediate the negative relationship between conservatism and support for abortion and euthanasia. As hypothesised, results from a nation-wide random sample of adults in New Zealand (N = 3360) revealed that purity/sanctity mediated the relationship between conservatism and opposition to both policies. These results demonstrate that, rather than being motivated by a desire to reduce harm, conservative opposition to pro-choice and end-of-life decisions is (partly) based on the view that ending a life, even if it is one's own, violates God's natural design and, thus, stains one's spiritual purity.

Morality-Based Assertion and Homophily on Social Media: A Cultural Comparison Between English and Japanese Languages

Moral psychology is a domain that deals with moral identity, appraisals and emotions. Previous work has primarily focused on moral development and the associated role of culture. Knowing that language is an inherent element of a culture, we used the social media platform Twitter to compare moral behaviors of Japanese tweets with English tweets. The five basic moral foundations, i.e., Care, Fairness, Ingroup, Authority, and Purity, along with the associated emotional valence were compared between English and Japanese tweets. The tweets from Japanese users depicted relatively higher Fairness, Ingroup, and Purity, whereas English tweets expressed more positive emotions for all moral dimensions. Considering moral similarities in connecting users on social media, we quantified homophily concerning different moral dimensions using our proposed method. The moral dimensions Care, Authority, and Purity for English and Ingroup, Authority and Purity for Japanese depicted homophily on Twitter. Overall, our study uncovers the underlying cultural differences with respect to moral behavior in English- and Japanese-speaking users.

Effects of Pathogen-Avoidance Tendency on Infection-Prevention Behaviors and Exclusionary Attitudes toward Foreigners: A Longitudinal Study of the COVID-19 Outbreak in Japan

This study investigated the changes in public behaviors and attitudes following the spread of COVID-19 in Japan. Using a longitudinal approach that analyzes the movement of an unpredictable and real infection threat to explain and predict human behavior during the pandemic-a novel approach in behavioral immune system research-a panel survey was conducted on Japanese citizens. The results of the survey, conducted in late January, mid-February, and early March 2020, indicated that the influence of the interaction between the changes in situational infection threat and individual differences in pathogen-avoidance tendency on infection-prevention behaviors and exclusionary attitudes toward foreigners was not significant. Moreover, frequent contact with foreigners had a mitigating effect on exclusionary attitudes. The study thus provided a valuable contribution to the application of behavioral immune-system responses to problems associated with infection threats. Moreover, consideration of the aspects of adaptive reaction and social learning allowed us to observe the process of adaptive strategies in novel environments under conditions of high ecological validity and to accurately understand the psychological response to infectious disease outbreaks.

Appraisal of the Fairness Moral Foundation Predicts the Language Use Involving Moral Issues on Twitter Among Japanese

Moral appraisals are found to be associated with a person’s individual differences (e.g., political ideology), and the effects of individual differences on language use have been studied within the framework of the Moral Foundations Theory (MFT). However, the relationship between one’s moral concern and the use of language involving morality on social media is not self-evident. The present exploratory study investigated that relationship using the MFT. Participants’ tweets and self-reported responses to the questionnaire were collected to measure the degree of their appraisals according to the five foundations of the MFT. The Japanese version of the Moral Foundations Dictionary (J-MFD) was used to quantify the number of words in tweets relevant to the MFT’s five moral foundations. The results showed that endorsement of the Fairness and Authority foundations predicted the word frequency in the J-MFD across all five foundations. The findings suggest that the trade-off relationship between the Fairness and Authority foundations plays a key role in online language communication. The implications and future directions to scrutinize that foundation are discussed.