Interpersonal relations and helping norms among university students of Japan, Taiwan, and Korea

This study investigated the effects of interpersonal relations on some aspects of moral judgment among 68 Japanese, 70 Chinese, and 92 Korean university students. The subjects were asked to judge agents' acts in stories about varied helping situations which formed a factorial design: familiarity and kinship between subjects and the agent, those between the agent and the victim, and actions. Analysis showed that the two relationships between the agent and the victim significantly affected judgments in three cultures. The magnitudes of the effects of kinship between agent and victim varied across the cultures.