Americans are more critical of their fellow citizens’ morality than people in any other country surveyed by the Pew Research Center study in a new report. The study surveyed 25 countries on whether behaviors like abortion, drinking alcohol and LGBTQ relationships were morally acceptable, unacceptable or not a moral issue at all.
“The United States is the only place we surveyed where more adults (ages 18 and older) describe the morality and ethics of others living in the country as bad (53%) than as good (47%),” according to the report. Pew surveyed 28,000 adults outside the U.S. and 3,600 adults within the country. The interviews were conducted over the phone.
Countries like Sweden, India, Indonesia and Canada have the highest proportions of citizens who rate their fellow citizens’ morality positively — between 88% and 92% respectively. In its proportion of morally skeptical adults, the U.S. is followed by Turkey, where 49% don’t approve of others’ moral choices, Brazil at 48% and Greece at 44%.
Researchers point to partisan politics as one contributing factor. Another theory, according to the report, is that Americans tend to be more “moralistic” than people in other countries, and more prone to labeling others’ behaviors as immoral or sinful. Although, responses to other survey questions don’t show that Americans are unusually judgmental, according to the report.
The report found that Democrats and left-leaning independents are more likely than Republicans to deem other Americans as “morally and ethically bad,” though both parties have seen an increase in those who view their political opponents as morally deficient. More precisely, 60% of Democrats are willing to say their opponents’ behavior is morally wrong as opposed to 46% among Republicans.
The political-moral divide isn’t uniquely American, either. In more than half of the countries surveyed, those who oppose the party in power are more inclined to view other citizens as lacking moral character.
The study also reveals some notable demographic patterns. On questions about pornography and homosexuality, men are more likely than women to consider these behaviors morally wrong. Religion plays a role, too. Christians and other religious groups tend to view more behaviors as immoral, though this varies significantly by region. Most Christians in Africa, Latin America and the U.S. say abortion is morally wrong, while that number drops to just 7% in Germany and 13% in France. Across all 25 countries, higher education levels and older age correlate with viewing certain behaviors as more morally acceptable.
Jacob Hickman, a professor of anthropology at Brigham Young University who studies cross-cultural differences in morality and moral reasoning, doesn’t see Americans as particularly moralistic when compared to other cultures, he said. “They’re definitely more moralistic in an American sort of way,” he said. “In many of these communities, people are highly surveilling of the moral behaviors of people around them, but the particular behaviors being surveilled or moralized may vary.”
What is considered morally right or wrong is deeply rooted in cultural context, according to Hickman, and closed-ended survey questions often fail to grasp the full cultural nuance of how people reason through moral dilemmas.
Hickman recently co-published an article that argued that people across all cultural contexts are moral realists — a belief that moral claims about what’s right and wrong are objectively true. What varies culturally, Hickman said, is how these moral absolute beliefs apply in a particular cultural context. For example, the protection of the vulnerable.
“It’s kind of a moral absolute, a very basic moral concept that is recognizable anywhere you go,” he said. “But who counts as vulnerable in a particular cultural context is going to vary.”
Moral views have also shifted since Pew last asked similar questions in 2013, the report noted. Across all countries, fewer people now consider divorce morally wrong. Kenya saw the sharpest change, dropping from 59% who viewed divorce as morally wrong in 2013 to 30% in 2025. The U.S. has remained relatively stable at 22%, while Mexico and Indonesia each saw roughly a 10-point decline.
The shift in moral attitudes, according to Hickman, can be attributed to the spread of neoliberalism, a set of views that emphasizes free markets and individualism. As these perspectives spread, morality becomes more intertwined with individual choice and personal happiness over shared social considerations. “As individualism spreads as a way of thinking about these issues, you tend to change what you might focus on as you consider the morality of a particular outcome,” Hickman said.
Pew report examined moral views on nine behaviors: extramarital affairs, marijuana use, gambling, pornography, abortion, homosexuality, drinking alcohol, divorce and use of contraceptives. Here is how moral views on some of these break down:
Homosexuality
On homosexuality, the U.S. falls roughly in the middle globally, with 39% viewing it as morally wrong — comparable to Israel (47%), Hungary (34%) and Greece (30%). In Sweden, Germany, Spain and the Netherlands, over 90% of people do not consider homosexuality morally wrong.
Extramarital affairs
Around 90% of Americans view marital infidelity as morally unacceptable, a sentiment shared by roughly 92% of people in Indonesia and Turkey. Germany and France sit at the opposite end, with more permissive attitudes — only about half of adults in each country consider extramarital affairs ethically wrong.
Gambling and marijuana
Most Americans, 70%, don’t see gambling as morally wrong (only 29% do.) But countries are quite divided on this topic. Countries such as Indonesia, Turkey and Nigeria take a much stricter view.
Along with the U.S., among the countries with smallest proportions of citizens who don’t see gambling as morally wrong are Canada (27%), Hungary (31%), and Germany, France and Sweden (all at 32%). On marijuana, 23% of Americans consider it a moral problem, and 50% do not view it as a moral issue at all.
Abortion
On the question of abortion, the moral view is split along geographical lines between Latin American and African countries and European countries. Countries in Latin America and Africa tend to view it as morally unacceptable, whereas most Europeans largely don’t see it as a moral problem or consider it completely acceptable.