Loyalty From a Personal Point of View: A Cross-Cultural Prototype Study of Loyalty

Loyalty is considered central to people's moral life, yet little is known about how people think about what it means to be loyal. We used a prototype approach to understand how loyalty is represented in Colombia and the United States and how these representations mediate attributions of loyalty and moral judgments of loyalty violations. Across seven studies (N = 1,984), we found cross-cultural similarities in the associative meaning of loyalty (Study 1) but found differences in the centrality of features associated with loyalty (Study 2) and the latent structure of loyalty representations (Study 3). Colombians represent loyalty in terms of more general moral characteristics, while U.S. participants represent loyalty in terms of interpersonal commitment, both in contrast with current approaches to loyalty. By comparing representations of loyalty and honesty, we establish that differences in loyalty conceptualizations reflect a different way of thinking about loyalty rather than morality more generally (Study 4). Further, Colombians attributed greater loyalty to individuals with general moral characteristics compared to participants from the U.S. sample (Study 5) and were more likely to classify nonloyal values as loyalty-related (Study 6). While the centrality of prototypical features predicts categorizing norm violations as loyalty-related, differences in prototypical structure account for differences in the severity of moral judgment for such violations (Study 7), which suggests that loyalty representations have similar functions, even though these representations differ in structural characteristics. Public Significance Statement Do people think differently about loyalty in other cultures? This study suggests that Colombians represent loyalty differently than people in the United States. For Colombians, general moral qualities of honesty, kindness, and caring are more central to being loyal. Differences in thinking about loyalty were associated with differences in how people from Colombia and the United States make moral judgments about loyalty violations. Theoretically, our results challenge the descriptive adequacy of theoretical characterizations of loyalty in terms of individual-to-group commitments. Methodologically, our studies provide a model of how prototype analysis can help design culturally sensitive instruments to study variation in moral attitudes.