SEORG seminar: Cognitive Constructs of Social Relationship and Morality Across Cultures

Social complexity in Homo sapiens manifests in the richness of social relationships and moral values. In this talk, I will present our recent work on the cognitive structures of two fundamental social knowledge: relationship concepts and moral concepts. Using a combination of online surveys, laboratory cognitive tasks, natural language processing, and computational modelling on diverse modern cultures across the world (total n = 35,000) and ancient cultures across more than 3,000 years of history, we examined universality and cultural variability in the ways that people conceptualize social relationships and morality. Our findings reveal a universal 5-dimensional representational space for relationship concepts (formality, activeness, valence, exchange, equality) and a 3-dimensional space for moral concepts (self, interpersonal, societal). Our work reveals the fundamental cognitive constructs and cultural principles of social knowledge and advances our understanding of human sociality.