Who deserves our moral concern first: family, strangers, animals, the natural environment, or people who have done serious harm?
Questions like these sit beneath many public arguments about humanitarian obligations, animal welfare, environmental protection and punishment. Yet much of the psychological evidence used to describe the so-called moral circle has come from Western, educated populations, particularly in the United States and other English-speaking countries.
A new cross-cultural analysis suggests that the broad ordering of moral concern travels further than that evidence base might imply. Researchers analysing responses from 6,561 university students across 41 cultural groups found substantial similarities in how people ranked different potential recipients of moral concern. At the same time, the study shows why national averages can conceal meaningful differences between individuals.
The research, published in the European Journal of Social Psychology, offers one of the broadest tests yet of whether a hierarchy previously observed mainly in Anglosphere samples appears across culturally diverse student populations. Research Today has also examined how biodiversity relates to ecosystem functions across European ponds, a separate example of why environmental priorities matter.
Testing whether the moral circle travels across cultures
The researchers re-analysed a large multi-lab dataset collected in 2018 and 2019. The original dataset contained 6,665 valid responses. After excluding 104 participants with missing moral-concern data, the analysis included 6,561 people from 41 universities in countries or culturally distinct regions spanning Africa, Asia, Europe, North and South America and Oceania.
The sample included students from South Africa, Nigeria, Uganda, China, Japan, South Korea, Pakistan, Malaysia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, several European countries, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the United States and elsewhere. Participants had an average age of 21.60 years, with a standard deviation of 5.75 years. About 63.37% were female and 29.72% were male.
Participants completed the Moral Expansiveness Scale. Rather than asking a single abstract question about who matters morally, the measure presented 30 specific targets grouped into 10 broader categories. These included family and friends, members of participants’ own social groups, revered people, stigmatised groups, human outgroups, highly sentient animals, the environment, lower-sentience animals, plants and people described as villains.
For example, family and friends included a family member, close friend and partner or spouse. Environmental targets included a national park, old-growth forest and coral reef. Human outgroups included a foreign citizen, a member of an opposing political party and someone with different religious beliefs.
Participants placed each target on a four-point scale ranging from outside the moral boundary to the highest level of moral concern and personal responsibility. The researchers then examined the relative ordering of the 10 groups rather than simply comparing raw scores between countries.
Eleven of 13 rankings typically replicated
At the cultural-group level, the broad pattern was strikingly consistent. Across the 41 samples, a median of 11 of 13 key pairwise rankings matched the hierarchy reported in earlier research. The mean was 11.32, with a standard deviation of 1.44.
Twelve cultural groups reproduced all 13 of the selected rankings. These included several Anglosphere samples, but also Belgium, Japan, the Netherlands, Portugal, Singapore and Ukraine. Even the most dissimilar sample, Malaysia, reproduced eight of the 13 rankings. The French-speaking Canadian, Chilean, German and Polish samples each reproduced nine.
Family and friends occupied the clearest position. Their average moral-concern score across cultural groups was 2.89 on the zero-to-three scale, close to the maximum. They received the highest average concern in every cultural group.
People classified as villains received the lowest average concern, at 0.58 across groups, and were at the bottom in all but three cultural samples: Hong Kong, Thailand and Uganda.
This does not mean that cultures were morally identical. Rather, it indicates that when researchers focused on the relative ordering of selected categories, much of the broad structure seen in previous Western studies reappeared across a far wider set of samples.
Individuals were much less uniform than country averages suggest
The more revealing result emerged when the researchers stopped averaging people together.
For individual participants, the median person reproduced only seven of the 13 previously observed rankings. The mean was 6.85, with a standard deviation of 1.86. In other words, a country-level pattern that looks highly stable can coexist with substantial variation in the moral ordering held by individual people.
Some comparisons were exceptionally consistent. Across the entire sample, 91.38% of participants placed family and friends above members of their broader ingroup.
Other comparisons were far less settled. Only 31.81% placed highly sentient animals above lower-sentience animals in the same direction as the reference hierarchy. The study also found that only about 38% prioritised human outgroups over the environment, illustrating how environmental and human-centred moral priorities can cross over within the same broad cultural samples.
Differences between countries in overall conformity to the typical hierarchy were comparatively modest. The highest average percentages were found in South Korea at 58.26%, Northern Ireland at 57.62% and Scotland at 56.64%. Poland was lowest at 48.08%, followed by French-speaking Canada at 48.66% and France at 49.30%.
What mattered more than country
The researchers used a multilevel logistic model to examine where variation in these rankings came from. The analysis contained 85,293 observations, representing 13 target-group comparisons for each of the 6,561 participants.
Which two groups were being compared explained 13.82% of the variance in whether a ranking matched the previously observed pattern. Individual differences accounted for 1.30%. Country accounted for only 0.2%.
That result changes how the cross-cultural finding should be interpreted. The data do not show that culture is irrelevant to morality. Instead, within this particular measure and these student samples, the identity of the moral targets was much more informative about whether the familiar ranking appeared than the participant’s country.
It also cautions against treating a national average as though it describes the moral priorities of a typical citizen. Similar care is needed when interpreting large population datasets: a South African study of employees’ differing needs highlights the importance of looking beyond overall averages. Two countries can produce similar aggregate hierarchies while containing quite different distributions of individual judgments.
Why the finding matters
The idea of a moral circle is useful because political and ethical disagreements often concern where moral obligations begin and end. Debates over refugees, environmental conservation, animal welfare and criminal punishment can all involve competing claims about which beings, groups or systems deserve priority.
The new analysis suggests there may be a surprisingly durable broad structure beneath those disagreements. Close relationships occupy an especially privileged moral position across the sampled cultures, while people framed as severe wrongdoers tend to receive much less concern.
But the individual-level results are equally important. A stable average hierarchy should not be mistaken for a universal moral rule. People within the same cultural setting can organise their moral concern in markedly different ways, particularly when comparing human outsiders, animals and the environment.
For researchers, this means cross-cultural moral psychology may benefit from examining distributions and individual profiles alongside country means. For policymakers and communicators, it suggests that appeals based on assumed national moral priorities may overlook substantial variation within the population they are trying to reach.
Important limits remain
The study is broad, but it is not nationally representative. Participants were university students, generally young and more educated than their wider populations. The authors note that the samples were also likely to be more liberal and from higher socioeconomic backgrounds than the general population in many participating countries.
The underlying data were collected in 2018 and 2019, so the publication is recent but the responses themselves are not. The analysis was descriptive and was not preregistered.
There is also an important measurement qualification. The researchers found evidence for configural invariance and partial support for metric invariance, but not scalar invariance. That makes direct comparisons of average scale levels between countries difficult to interpret. This is one reason the study concentrated on within-person and within-sample rankings rather than claiming that one country possesses more moral concern than another.
Finally, the categories themselves simplify complex moral relationships. A person’s concern for a refugee, forest, cow or political opponent can depend strongly on context, identity and how a question is framed. The results therefore map a broad structure of stated concern rather than providing a complete account of moral behaviour.
A shared structure with room for disagreement
The study offers evidence against two easy assumptions: that a hierarchy discovered in Western samples must be uniquely Western, and that a shared country-level pattern means individuals within a culture think alike.
Across 41 cultural groups, much of the previously reported ordering survived. Yet when the same data were examined person by person, the picture became substantially more varied.
That combination may be the most useful finding. Human moral concern can have a recognisable broad shape across very different cultural settings while still leaving considerable room for individuals to disagree about who, and what, belongs closer to the centre.
Source Information
Study Title: Exploring Cultural and Individual Differences in the Hierarchy of Moral Concern: Evidence From Student Samples Across 41 Cultural Groups
Authors: Işıl Ayça Akkuş, Charlie R. Crimston, Kelly Kirkland, Brock Bastian and Bastian Jaeger
Journal: European Journal of Social Psychology
First published: 14 September 2026
Sample: 6,561 university students from 41 cultural groups
Method: Cross-cultural re-analysis of Moral Expansiveness Scale data collected in 2018 and 2019
Main finding: A median of 11 of 13 previously reported moral-concern rankings replicated at the cultural-group level, while individual rankings were substantially more variable
DOI: 10.1002/ejsp.70114
