ABSTRACT
Ethics is about what is morally right and what is morally wrong. Each community creates its own ethical code for its members’ behavior. Cultural researchers deal with, at least, two cultural or moral (by Shweder) communities: their own and the one that they investigate. And here is the diffi culty: what is moral in one community may be immoral or ethically improper in the other one, and vice versa. So a researcher can be an ethical person by his or her community’s standards, but behave unethically in the community of his or her research. Such improper behavior may offend and/or harm, at least emotionally, members of native communities, thus violating their trust, hospitality, and, ultimately, the very basic values of respect and dignity of all human beings. Such unintentional immorality may also jeopardize the research process or even make it impossible. Professional cultural psychologists cannot allow this to happen. That is why the topic of ethics in cross-cultural research is important to discuss. The issue of ethical behavior is equally relevant for quantitatively oriented cross-cultural psychologists who apply standardized tests and questionnaires, and also for cultural psychologists who conduct ethnographic investigations and live in native communities for some time. Both forms of investigation require entering the community of interest, establishing a rapport and trust with the people there, negotiating the conditions of research, conducting research, communicating results, thanking the members of the community, and exiting it. All these steps should be done ethically, respectfully and without any inconvenience for members of the host community or distortion of research. But this is easier said than done.
