Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

People's moral views may vary across cultures. Previous work has explored certain aspects of this cultural variation, but the extent to which moral variation and universals are reflected in the mental lexicon is underexplored. We present an analysis that quantifies cultural moral universals and variation based on large-scale word association constructed from English and Rioplatense Spanish speakers. We find that concepts related to `wrongdoers' and `medicine' are moralized more prominently among Spanish speakers, while `conflict' and `military action' are more moralized among English speakers. Furthermore, we show that the mental lexicon viewed through semantic categorization and structure explains 13% and 7% of the variances in the English and Spanish speakers in terms of moral association. Our study demonstrates that the mental lexicon, particularly the semantic network, offers a rich resource for characterizing the relations of morality and culture through the lens of their cognitive underpinnings.