Add Moral universals: A machine-reading analysis of 256 societies

[SimonGreenhill]

https://www.cell.com/heliyon/fulltext/S2405-8440(24)01971-6

What is the cross-cultural prevalence of the seven moral values posited by the theory of “morality-as-cooperation”?
Previous research, using laborious hand-coding of ethnographic accounts of ethics from 60 societies, found examples of
most of the seven morals in most societies, and observed these morals with equal frequency across cultural regions. Here
we replicate and extend this analysis by developing a new Morality-as-Cooperation Dictionary (MAC-D) and using
Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) to machine-code ethnographic accounts of morality from an additional 196
societies (the entire Human Relations Area Files, or HRAF, corpus). Again, we find evidence of most of the seven morals in
most societies, across all cultural regions. The new method allows us to detect minor variations in morals across region
and subsistence strategy. And we successfully validate the new machine-coding against the previous hand-coding. In
light of these findings, MAC-D emerges as a theoretically-motivated, comprehensive, and validated tool for machine-
reading moral corpora. We conclude by discussing the limitations of the current study, as well as prospects for future
research.