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Cultural Influences on the Moral Status of Reciprocity and the Discounting of Endogenous Motivation

Yale University

David M. Bersoff

University of Pennsylvania

Americans and Hindu Indians evaluated hypothetical situations in which helping was performed in response to prior reciprocity, in response to a monetary payment, or spontaneously. Reciprocity considerations increase the number of Indians viewing helping in moral terms but had no effect on moral judgment among Americans. Americans judged that helping is less endogenously motivated when undertaken in response to the norm of reciprocity than when spontaneous, whereas Indians viewed helping as equally endogenously motivated in those two cases. Results imply that interpersonal reciprocity is invested with a deontological moral status rather than viewed in purely utilitarian terms in cultures emphasizing interdependent, as contrasted with independent, views of the self: The findings also suggest that less of a dichotomy is drawn between communal and exchange relationships and between endogenous motivation and normative conformity in the former type of culture.

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