engleski

Morality in the natural language: findings from the Croatian taxonomy of personality descriptors

The issue of morality became one of the most salient phenomena studied in psychology in recent years. However, despite the popularity of the construct, we know of no studies on the morality in the natural language. Following the basic premise of the lexical approach that all significant individual differences are embodied in language we conducted a psycholexical study of morality in the Croatian language, as a part of larger study on natural-language virtues. In the first study, a group of 11 judges used the 2045 adjectives classified as prototypical for the categories of dispositions and social aspects of personality from the Croatian taxonomy and rated how well these adjectives describe morality (or lack thereof). The first study yielded 163 morality descriptors in the Croatian language. In the second study, those 163 adjectives were rated for self-descriptions by a large sample of (N≈500) University of Zagreb students and for peer-descriptions by (N≈500) students’ best acquaintances. Discussed is the underlying structure of morality in the natural language, the relations of those dimensions with existing measures of morality, the Big-Five factors of personality, as well as the relations between morality and virtues in the natural language.

morality; natural language; personality; lexical aproach

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