The claim asserts that "to some extent, culture and upbringing dictate what one finds acceptable within society's rules." The cause is culture and upbringing; the effect is what an individual finds acceptable within society's rules (i.e., personal moral/societal norms of acceptability). This is a well-established finding across multiple social science disciplines. The evidence is robust and converging: 1. Cross-cultural psychology: A study published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience (2022) compared parental moral socialization in Japan and the United States, finding that culture shapes how parents discuss moral actions with children and how children develop moral reasoning. US parents emphasized dispositional evaluations, while Japanese parents emphasized emotional consequences — demonstrating that cultural context shapes moral frameworks from early childhood. 2. Religious upbringing and moral formation: A longitudinal study using the National Study of Youth and Religion (published in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion) found "strong links between religious upbringing and later moral characteristics," with religious factors playing a stronger role than sociodemographics or parental political ideology in predicting adult moral traits. 3. Cultural transmission research: A large-scale study published in PLOS ONE (2024) involving 1,905 university students and 4,000 of their parents, grandparents, and friends found that "cultural resemblance is strongest for religiosity, political orientation, environmentalism, and health behaviours," with clear vertical transmission from parents to children and lasting parental influence throughout life. 4. Norm emergence through cultural transmission: Research from Cambridge (published in PNAS) demonstrated through five studies (N=3,688) that injunctive norms — rules about what is forbidden, obligatory, or permissible — emerge through iterated cultural transmission, showing how cultural learning processes shape what people regard as acceptable or impermissible. 5. Cross-cultural value transmission: A Nature Humanities and Social Sciences Communications study (2025) confirmed that across cultures, parents seek to instill normative behaviors and value standards harmonious with their sociocultural context, and that personal values are partly shaped by societal-level cultural values. The claim's qualifier "to some extent" makes it even more defensible, as the research acknowledges multiple interacting factors (biological, psychological, environmental) alongside culture and upbringing. The causal link is not merely correlational: longitudinal studies track upbringing to later moral outcomes, experimental studies manipulate cultural framing to observe changes in moral reasoning, and cross-cultural comparisons reveal systematic differences attributable to cultural context. Sources: - Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, "Emotion or Evaluation: Cultural Differences in the Parental Socialization of Moral Judgement" — https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/human-neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2022.867308/full - Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, "Linking Religious Upbringing to Young Adult Moral Formation" — https://doi.org/10.1111/jssr.12835 - PLOS ONE, "Cultural transmission of attitudes and behaviours from parents, peers and grandparents" — https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0341433 - Nature Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, "Cross-cultural similarities and variations in parent-child value transmission" — https://preview-www.nature.com/articles/s41599-025-06287-5 - University of Michigan / Cambridge repository, "Culture Shapes Moral Reasoning About Close Others" — https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/emotion-selfcontrol-psych/wp-content/uploads/sites/1322/2025/01/Culture-Shapes-Moral-Reasoning-About-Close-Others.pdf - Cambridge repository, "Injunctive norms emerge through iterated learning" — https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/a72aaedd-d473-486b-8881-579698158d84/download