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 ( = 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).