Moral Lessons from Folktales: How Greed Is Punished Across Cultures

Research Questions and Dataset:

What We Aim to Uncover

What are the most common motifs and moral themes in folktales and fairy tales across different cultures, and how do these themes compare across regions?

To explore this question, I compiled a dataset of over 800 folktales from the Yashpeh International Folktale Collection. Each selected tale contains themes of greed, avarice, excess, or moral consequence, filtered using keyword searches and categorized using the Thompson Motif Index.

The dataset includes the title, text, and regional origin of each tale. I preprocessed the data using tokenization, stopword removal, and lemmatization, and then applied TF-IDF and cosine similarity to identify thematic overlaps between story content and motif descriptions.

In this initial stage, I focused on identifying which cultural traditions were most represented in the dataset and which motif types most frequently matched the stories' text content.

The most represented traditions included:

• India (271 stories)

• Germany (56 stories)

• Italy (44 stories)

• Turkey (25 stories)

• Indian Cherokee (24 stories)

• Russia (22 stories)

• American Indian (18 stories)

I found that the top matching motifs across many stories were consistently related to trickery, deception, and greed/avarice.

For example:

• A Brother and Sister Pursued by a Man-Eater was most similar to motifs like X931_trickery_deception and M312.3_greed_avarice

• A Dirty Rotten Trick aligned with several deception-related motifs such as K869.4_trickery_deception and X1267.2_trickery_deception

These results suggest that themes of deceit and moral failing—especially greed and manipulation—are central to many folktales across regions.

(Insert visualization here: e.g., a bar plot of top matched motif categories across traditions or regions)

I preprocessed the data using tokenization, stopword removal, and lemmatization and then applied TF-IDF and cosine similarity to identify thematic overlaps between story content and motif descriptions.

Visualization:

In the bar plot below, the most common themes across all tales are punishment, loss, and magical transformation. While European and Middle Eastern traditions frequently depict moral punishment, Asian folktales more often involve tests of character and eventual rewards. North American Indigenous stories tend to highlight themes of balance with nature and community impact, rather than individual greed alone.

Most Frequent Themes in Greed-Related Folktales by Region

The word cloud below visualizes the most frequently occurring terms across all folktales in the dataset. Prominent words such as "king," "take," "good," "brother," and "man" suggest recurring narrative elements that span cultures:

• Power and Authority: Words like "king" reflect how figures of status and control often anchor folktales about greed.

• Action and Exchange: Terms such as "take," "give," and "good" reveal moral contrasts and plot-driving decisions.

• Familial Conflict: The frequent appearance of "brother" points to sibling rivalries and internal family struggles.

• Gendered Roles: The word "man" hints at the centrality of male characters in many tales, often as agents of action or moral failing.

This visualization complements the thematic bar plot by offering a linguistic snapshot of the narrative landscape, helping us understand how cultural anxieties around greed are encoded not just in motifs, but in the words themselves.

Word Cloud: Most Common Terms in Greed-Related Folktales

Reflection and Next Steps:

This exploratory analysis shows that while greed is universally condemned, the form of moral resolution varies across cultures. Some traditions emphasize transformation, others punishment, and still others allow for reformation or even reward.

My next steps include:

• Expanding visualizations to show co-occurring motifs across tales

• Exploring correlations between themes and the gender or social role of central characters

• Running sentiment analysis to determine whether certain regions use more emotionally intense or moralizing language

• Comparing original and translated texts to examine how translation may influence the portrayal of morality

  
  

These next steps will help uncover how cultural norms shape the storytelling of moral lessons, and whether those lessons shift depending on who is telling—and who is being taught.