Comparing cultural differences with domain-specific differences of appreciating and understanding values

ABSTRACT

Human endeavors such as promoting science or creating art have a close connection to underlying values and virtues. For example, creativity, curiosity or objectivity provide orientation when working as scientist or artist, outlining the ultimate aim of practitioners active in those domains. The appreciation and interpretation of domain values are expected to depend upon the domain, which should less be the case for moral values. This study investigates differences in the semantics, perceived importance and interpretation of 10 domain and 10 moral values in two domains (art and medicine) and two cultural settings (US, N = 336; Switzerland, N = 554). It is shown that the semantic understanding of values is robust with respect to culture and domain and that the appreciation of values varies in dependence of the domains but not the culture. Cultural factors have a greater impact compared to the domain for domain value interpretation, but not moral value interpretation.

KEYWORDS:

• Values
• virtues
• art
• medicine
• semantics
• culture
• practice

Acknowledgement

The author thanks Darcia Narvaes (University of Notre Dame) and Carmen Tanner (University of Zurich) for their valuable input when preparing this study and Markus Kneer for advice regarding the statistical analysis.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Supplemental material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Notes

1. In this contribution, the notion of ‘practice domain’ refers to coherent and complex forms of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized following certain standards of excellence (MacIntyre, 1985), whereas these standards can be understood as values. Those domains are not necessarily related to clearly defined professional curricula and the like. For persons active in those domains, the notion of ‘practitioner’ is used.

2. An exploratory search in the database PsychINFO using the search expression [‘moral value’ AND difference AND (social OR professional)] yielded no relevant papers. If the search is not restricted to moral values, the number of entries increases largely, yet many papers use the term ‘value’ in a different meaning.

3. Autonomy is a special case: although the values is considered to be an important ethical orientation in medicine, empirical studies show a significant lower appreciation of autonomy as moral value (see Christen et al., 2014 for details)—this was also the case in this sample. We therefore grouped autonomy into the practice domain.

4. For example, the Developing Virtues in the Practice of Science project investigated the value ‘meticulousness’ defined as ‘attention to method and details in one’s conduct,’ which can reasonably be related to the notion of ‘carefulness’ used in this study.

5. It can be added that the clear difference when comparing domains vs. cultures (results shown in Tables 2 and 3) remains even when taking the Bonferroni correction—arguably, the most conservative one and the one with the highest risk of Type 2 errors—although the numbers of significant pairs themselves change.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Markus Christen

Markus Christen is a Senior Research Fellow in the Institute of Biomedical Ethics and History of Medicine at the University of Zurich and Managing Director of the Digital Society Initiative of the University of Zurich. His research focus is empirical ethics, neuroethics, ethics & technology, Serious Moral Games and data analysis methodologies.