Moral foundations theory

Short description: Theory in social psychology

Moral foundations theory is a social psychological theory intended to explain the origins of and variation in human moral reasoning on the basis of innate, modular foundations.[1][2][3][4] It was first proposed by the psychologists Jonathan Haidt, Craig Joseph, and Jesse Graham, building on the work of cultural anthropologist Richard Shweder.[5] More recently, Mohammad Atari, Jesse Graham, and Jonathan Haidt have revised some aspects of the theory and developed new measurement tools.[6] The theory has been developed by a diverse group of collaborators and popularized in Haidt's book The Righteous Mind.[7] The theory proposes that morality is "more than one thing", first arguing for five foundations, and later expanding for six foundations (adding Liberty/Oppression):

* Care/harm
* Fairness/cheating
* Loyalty/betrayal
* Authority/subversion
* Sanctity/degradation
* Liberty/oppression.[8][7]

Its authors remain open to the addition, subtraction, or modification of the set of foundations.[2]

Although the initial development of moral foundations theory focused on cultural differences, subsequent work with the theory has largely focused on political ideology. Various scholars have offered moral foundations theory as an explanation of differences among political progressives (liberals in the American sense), conservatives, and right-libertarians (libertarians in the American sense),[9] and have suggested that it can explain variation in opinion on politically charged issues such as same-sex marriage, abortion,[10] and even vaccination.[11][12]

## Contents

* 1 Origins
* 2 Foundations
* 2.1 Main five
* 2.2 Liberty foundation
* 2.3 Honor/Qeirat foundation
* 2.4 Additional candidate foundations
* 3 Methods
* 3.1 Moral Foundations Questionnaire
* 3.2 Other methods
* 4 Applications
* 4.1 Political ideology
* 4.2 Cross-cultural differences
* 4.3 Sex differences
* 4.4 Morality in language
* 5 Critiques and competing theories
* 6 References
* 7 External links

## Origins

Studies on what Haidt and his colleagues termed "moral dumbfounding" preceded the moral foundations theory.[13] Moral dumbfounding is the experience where a person has an intuitive response that an act is moral or immoral, but cannot rationally articulate what makes the act moral or not.[14] Haidt argued that moral dumbfounding supported moral sentimentalism, the philosophical idea that emotion drives moral judgement, over moral rationalism.[15] Work on exploring moral dumbfounding presented individuals with scenarios that did not cause physical harm, such as incest or cannibalism of the dead, to develop a framework based on moral intuitionism.[16] Haidt and Joseph proposed five criteria to identify the potential innate emotional bases of morals:[17]

1. A common effect on judgement from others
2. An immediate emotional response
3. Presence across multiple cultures
4. Evidence of a biological predisposition
5. Plausible evolutionary advantage.

Moral foundations theory was first proposed in 2004 by Haidt and Joseph.[1] The theory emerged as a reaction against the developmental rationalist theory of morality associated with Lawrence Kohlberg and Jean Piaget, which argues that moral reasoning changes and develops over six stages of moral development,[18] each more adequate than the last in addressing moral complexity. Kohlberg's work emphasized justice as the key concept in moral reasoning, seen as a primarily cognitive activity, and became the dominant approach to moral psychology, heavily influencing subsequent work.[7][19] Haidt writes that he found Kohlberg's theories unsatisfying from the time he first encountered them in graduate school because they "seemed too cerebral" and lacked a focus on issues of emotion.[20]

In contrast to the dominant theories of morality in psychology at the time, the anthropologist Richard Shweder developed a set of theories emphasizing the cultural variability of moral judgments, but argued that different cultural forms of morality drew on "three distinct but coherent clusters of moral concerns", which he labeled as the ethics of autonomy, community, and divinity.[5][21] Shweder's approach inspired Haidt to begin researching moral differences across cultures, including fieldwork in Brazil and Philadelphia.[22] This work led Haidt to begin developing his social intuitionist approach to morality.[18] This approach, which stood in sharp contrast to Kohlberg's rationalist work, suggested that mostly "moral judgment is caused by quick moral intuitions" while moral reasoning simply serves largely as a post-hoc rationalization of already formed judgments.[18] Haidt's work and his focus on quick, intuitive, emotional judgments quickly became very influential, attracting sustained attention from an array of researchers.[23]

As Haidt and his collaborators worked within the social intuitionist approach, they began to devote attention to the sources of the intuitions that they believed underlay moral judgments. In a 2004 article published in the journal Daedalus,[1] Haidt and Joseph surveyed works on the roots of morality, including the work of Frans de Waal, Donald Brown and Shweder, as well as Alan Fiske's relational models theory[24] and Shalom Schwartz's theory of basic human values.[25] From their review of these earlier lines of research, they suggested that all individuals possess four "intuitive ethics", stemming from the process of human evolution as responses to adaptive challenges.[1] They labelled these four ethics as suffering, hierarchy, reciprocity, and purity.

Invoking the notion of preparedness, Haidt and Joseph claimed that each of the ethics formed a cognitive module, whose development was shaped by culture.[1][26] They wrote that each module could "provide little more than flashes of affect when certain patterns are encountered in the social world", while a cultural learning process shaped each individual's response to these flashes. Morality diverges because different cultures utilize the four "building blocks" provided by the modules differently.[1] Their Daedalus article became the first statement of moral foundations theory,[1] which Haidt, Graham, Joseph, and others have since elaborated and refined, for example by splitting the originally proposed ethic of hierarchy into the separate moral foundations of ingroup and authority, and by proposing a tentative sixth foundation of liberty.[2]

## Foundations

A simple graphic depicting survey data from the United States intended to support moral foundations theory

### Main five

According to moral foundations theory, differences in people's moral concerns can be described in terms of five moral foundations: an individualizing cluster of Care and Fairness, and the group-focused binding cluster of Loyalty, Authority and Sanctity.[9][27] The empirical evidence favoring this grouping comes from patterns of associations between the moral foundations observed with the Moral Foundations Questionnaire.[9][4]

### Liberty foundation

A sixth foundation, Liberty (opposite of oppression) was theorized by Jonathan Haidt in The Righteous Mind,[7] chapter eight, in response to economic conservatives complaining that the 5 foundation model did not caption their notion of fairness correctly, which focused on proportionality, not equality. This means people are treated fairly based on what they have earned, and are not treated equally unconditionally. This sixth foundation changes the theory so that the fairness/cheating foundation no longer has a split personality; it's no longer about equality and proportionality. It primarily becomes about proportionality.[7]

### Honor/Qeirat foundation

In 2020, Mohammad Atari and Jesse Graham worked on a potential moral foundation which is particularly important in Middle Eastern cultures, namely honor or "Qeirat" (a Persian term, originally coming from Arabic).[28] Interviews employing qualitative methods indicated that alongside moral considerations similar to those in the original conceptualization of MFT, a key element in Middle Eastern moral perspectives is "Qeirat". While this term lacks a direct translation in English, it closely aligns with the concept of 'honor' and encompasses the safeguarding and defense of female relatives, romantic partners, extended family members, and the nation. This research identified a strong correlation between Qeirat and Loyalty, Authority, and Purity, as well as adherence to Islamic religious beliefs, and behaviors associated with maintaining romantic relationships. These authors argued that Qeirat values operate in a way to maintain intensive kinship structures which can in turn function to keep resources in the group.[29] These authors also developed and validated the 24-item Qeirat Values Scale (QVS).

### Additional candidate foundations

Several other candidate foundations have also been discussed: Efficiency/waste, Ownership/theft,[30] and Honesty/deception.[3][2]

## Methods

### Moral Foundations Questionnaire

A large amount of research on moral foundations theory uses self-report instruments such as the Moral Foundations Questionnaire, formally published in 2011[4] (though earlier versions of the questionnaire had already been published[9]). Subsequent investigations using the Moral Foundations Questionnaire in other cultures have found broadly similar correlations between morality and political identification to those of the US, with studies taking place in Korea, Sweden and New Zealand.[31][32][33] However, other studies suggest that the structure of the MFQ is inconsistent across demographic groups (e.g., comparing religious and non-religious[34][35] and Black and White respondents[36]) and across cultures.[37]

A substantially updated version of the MFQ (the MFQ-2) was published in 2023.[38] MFQ-2 is a 36-item measure of moral foundations which captures Care, Equality, Proportionality, Loyalty, Authority, and Purity. Each sub-scale has six items. MFQ-2 has been shown to have good psychometric properties across cultures.

### Other methods

Other materials and methods used to study moral foundations theory include the Moral Foundations Sacredness Scale,[39] Moral Foundations Vignettes,[40][41][42] the Socio-Moral Image Database,[43] and Character Moral Foundations Questionnaire.[44] Research on moral language use have also relied on variants of a Moral Foundations Dictionary (MFD).[9][45][46][47] Moral Foundations Dictionary 2 (MFD2) has been shown to outperform MFD, hence may be a better option for language-based assessment of moral foundations.[48]

Researchers have also examined the topographical maps of somatosensory reactions associated with violations of different moral foundations.[49] Specifically, in a study where participants were asked to describe key aspects of their subjective somatosensory experience in response to scenarios involving various moral violations, body patterns corresponding to violations of moral foundations were felt in different regions of the body depending on whether participants were liberal or conservative.

## Applications

### Political ideology

Results of the Moral Foundations Questionnaire

Researchers have found that people's sensitivities to the five/six moral foundations correlate with their political ideologies. Using the Moral Foundations Questionnaire, Haidt and Graham found that libertarians are most sensitive to the proposed Liberty foundation,[7] liberals are most sensitive to the Care and Fairness foundations, while conservatives are equally sensitive to all five/six foundations.[4]

According to Haidt, the differences have significant implications for political discourse and relations. Because members of two political camps are, to a degree, blind to one or more of the moral foundations of the others, they may perceive morally driven words or behavior as having another basis - at best self-interest, at worst evil, and thus demonize one another.[50]

Haidt and Graham suggest a compromise can be found to allow liberals and conservatives to see eye-to-eye.[51] They suggest that the five foundations can be used as "doorway" to allow liberals to step to the conservative side of the "wall" put up between these two political affiliations on major political issues (e.g. legalizing gay marriage). If liberals try to consider the latter three foundations in addition to the former two (therefore adopting all five foundations like conservatives for a brief amount of time) they could understand the conservatives' viewpoints.

Researchers postulate that the moral foundations arose as solutions to problems common in the ancestral hunter-gatherer environment, in particular intertribal and intra-tribal conflict. The three foundations emphasized more by conservatives (Loyalty, Authority, Sanctity) bind groups together for greater strength in intertribal competition while the other two foundations balance those tendencies with concern for individuals within the group. With reduced sensitivity to the group moral foundations, progressives tend to promote a more universalist morality.[52]

The usefulness of moral foundations theory as an explanation for political ideology has been contested on the grounds that moral foundations are less heritable than political ideology,[53] and longitudinal data suggest that political ideology predicts subsequent endorsement of moral foundations, but moral foundations endorsement does not predict subsequent political ideology.[54] The latter finding suggests that the direction of causality is the opposite of what moral foundations theorists assume: moral judgments are produced by motivated reasoning anchored in political beliefs, rather than political beliefs being produced by moral intuitions.[54][55] A 2023 study also showed that liberals and conservatives have different neural activations when processing violations of moral foundations, particularly in areas related to semantic processing, attention, and emotion, "suggesting that political ideology moderates the social-affective experience of moral violations".[56]

### Cross-cultural differences

Haidt's initial field work in Brazil and Philadelphia in 1989,[22] and Odisha, India in 1993, showed that moralizing indeed varies among cultures, but less than by social class (e.g. education) and age. Working-class Brazilian children were more likely to consider both taboo violations and infliction of harm to be morally wrong, and universally so. Members of traditional, collectivist societies, like political conservatives, are more sensitive to violations of the community-related moral foundations. Adult members of so-called WEIRD (western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic)[57] societies are the most individualistic, and most likely to draw a distinction between harm-inflicting violations of morality and violations of convention.[7]

Recently, Jonathan Haidt and Mohammad Atari[58] made the case that MFT, and especially MFQ-2, can be particularly useful for cross-cultural research, including the World Values Survey (WVS) community since WVS started adopting MFQ-2. MFT can be of significant assistance to researchers in their quest to understand worldwide psychological diversity and to those aiming to foster democracy globally, by focusing on at least four key areas. These areas include: (a) variation across populations; (b) variations in political views and the extent of polarization in different political systems around the globe; (c) shifts in cultural norms and values; and (d) the roles of institutions and the development of democratic processes.

### Sex differences

A recent large-scale (u = 336,691) analysis of sex differences based on the five moral foundations suggested that women consistently score higher on care, fairness, and purity across 67 cultures.[59] However, loyalty and authority were shown to have negligible sex differences, highly variable across cultures. This study, published in 2020 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, also examined country-level sex differences in moral foundations in relation to cultural, socioeconomic, and gender-related indicators revealing that global sex differences in moral foundations are larger in individualistic, Western, and gender-equal cultures.[59] Examining multivariate sex differences in the five moral foundations (i.e. Mahalanobis' D as well as its disattenuated bias-corrected version) in moral judgements, the authors concluded that multivariate effects were substantially larger than previously estimated sex differences in moral judgements using non-MFT frameworks[60] and, more generally, the median effect size in social and personality psychology research.[61] Mahalanobis' D of the five moral foundations were significantly larger in individualist and gender-equal countries.

### Morality in language

Multiple studies have studied MFT in the context of natural language.[62][63][64]

An early text analysis of religious sermons found that liberal clergy used more harm and fairness words while conservative clergy used more ingroup, authority, and purity words.[9] However, a large-scale replication and extension of this original text analysis study found only limited support for liberal-conservative differences in moral foundation language, with a 30% replication success rate and effect sizes approximately 38 times smaller than those originally reported.[65]

Although people subjectively think that more than 20% of their daily conversations touch on morality, close examination of everyday language, using machine learning models, has shown that people do not actually talk much about morality (as measured by moral foundations) often.[66] More specifically, only 4.7% of recorded conversations and 2.2% of social media posts (on Facebook) touched on morality, with Care and Fairness being more prevalent.

## Critiques and competing theories

A number of researchers have offered critiques of, and alternative theories to, moral foundations theory. Critiques of the theory have included claims of biological implausibility[67] and redundancy among the moral foundations, which have been argued to be reducible to concern about harm[68][69][70] or to threat-reducing versus empathizing motivations.[55] Both critiques have been disputed by the original authors.[71][72] Alternative theories include the model of moral motives,[73] the theory of dyadic morality,[68][69] relationship regulation theory,[74] the right-wing authoritarianism scale developed by Bob Altemeyer,[75] the theory of morality as cooperation,[76][77] the theory of political ideology as motivated social cognition,[54][55] and impartial approaches to ethical questions, such as justice as fairness by John Rawls and the categorical imperative by Immanuel Kant.[78]

The Purity foundation in particular has been the subject of criticism due to the lack of substantial evidence supporting the alleged link between the emotion of disgust and supposed Purity-related transgressions.[79][80] Rather, research conducted in both the US and India, suggest that violations of the sacred (i.e., Purity-related transgressions) elicit a range of negative emotions (e.g., anger) rather than the specific emotion of core disgust associated with pathogen-related events.[80]

Recent critiques of moral foundations theory have also highlighted the limitations of relying solely on moral values to explain moral cognition. Beal[81] argues that moral cognition is fundamentally shaped by ontological framing, which refers to the ways in which individuals perceive and attribute inherent value to entities in their moral landscape (rather than by a fixed set of highly abstract moral foundations).

The moral foundations were found to be correlated with the theory of basic human values developed by Schwartz. The strong correlations are between conservative values in this theory and the binding foundations.[82]

A 2026 study found no evidence that reframing political positions and issues to moral foundations shifted support among conservatives and liberals for those political issues.[83]

## References

1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 Haidt, Jonathan; Craig Joseph (Fall 2004). "Intuitive ethics: how innately prepared intuitions generate culturally variable virtues". Daedalus 133 (4): 55–66. doi:10.1162/0011526042365555. http://faculty.virginia.edu/haidtlab/articles/haidt.joseph.2004.intuitive-ethics.pub035.pdf. Retrieved 2012-10-13.
2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 Graham, J.; Haidt, J.; Koleva, S.; Motyl, M.; Iyer, R.; Wojcik, S.; Ditto, P.H. (2013). Moral Foundations Theory: The pragmatic validity of moral pluralism. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology. 47. pp. 55–130 [103–104, 107. doi:10.1016/b978-0-12-407236-7.00002-4. ISBN 978-0-12-407236-7. http://www-bcf.usc.edu/~jessegra/papers/GHKMIWD.inpress.MFT.AESP.pdf. Retrieved 2017-03-08.
3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 Graham, Jesse; Haidt, Jonathan; Motyl, Matt; Meindl, Peter; Iskiwitch, Carol; Mooijman, Marlon (2018). "Moral Foundations Theory: On the advantages of moral pluralism over moral monism". in Gray, Kurt; Graham, Jesse. The Atlas of Moral Psychology: Mapping Good and Evil in the Mind. New York: Guilford Press. pp. 211–222.
4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 Graham, Jesse; Nosek, Brian A.; Haidt, Jonathan; Iyer, Ravi; Koleva, Spassena; Ditto, Peter H. (2011). "Mapping the moral domain.". Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 101 (2): 366–385. doi:10.1037/a0021847. PMID 21244182. PMC 3116962. http://www-bcf.usc.edu/~jessegra/papers/GNHIKD.2011.Mapping the moral domain.JPSP.pdf. Retrieved 2017-03-08.
5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 Shweder, Richard; Much, Nancy; Mahapatra, Manamohan; Park, Lawrence (1997). "The "big three" of morality (autonomy, community, divinity) and the "big three" explanations of suffering.". in Brandt, Allan; Rozin, Paul. Morality and Health. Routledge. pp. 119–169.
6. ↑ "Moral Foundations Theory | moralfoundations.org" (in en-US). https://moralfoundations.org/.
7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5 7.6 Haidt, Jonathan (2012). The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided By Politics and Religion. New York: Pantheon Books. pp. 9–11. ISBN 978-0-307-37790-6. https://archive.org/details/righteousmindwhy0000haid/page/9.
8. ↑ Iyer, Ravi; Koleva, Spassena; Graham, Jesse; Ditto, Peter; Haidt, Jonathan (2012). "Understanding Libertarian Morality: The Psychological Dispositions of Self-Identified Libertarians". PLOS ONE 7 (8). doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0042366. PMID 22927928. Bibcode: 2012PLoSO...742366I.
9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 9.2 9.3 9.4 9.5 Graham, Jesse; Haidt, Jonathan; Nosek, Brian A. (2009). "Liberals and conservatives rely on different sets of moral foundations.". Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 96 (5): 1029–1046. doi:10.1037/a0015141. PMID 19379034.
10. ↑ Koleva, Spassena P.; Graham, Jesse; Iyer, Ravi; Ditto, Peter H.; Haidt, Jonathan (April 2012). "Tracing the threads: How five moral concerns (especially Purity) help explain culture war attitudes". Journal of Research in Personality 46 (2): 184–194. doi:10.1016/j.jrp.2012.01.006.
11. ↑ Reimer, Nils Karl; Atari, Mohammad; Karimi-Malekabadi, Farzan; Trager, Jackson; Kennedy, Brendan; Graham, Jesse; Dehghani, Morteza (September 2022). "Moral values predict county-level COVID-19 vaccination rates in the United States.". American Psychologist 77 (6): 743–759. doi:10.1037/amp0001020. ISSN 1935-990X. PMID 36074569.
12. ↑ Amin, Avnika B.; Bednarczyk, Robert A.; Ray, Cara E.; Melchiori, Kala J.; Graham, Jesse; Huntsinger, Jeffrey R.; Omer, Saad B. (December 2017). "Association of moral values with vaccine hesitancy". Nature Human Behaviour 1 (12): 873–880. doi:10.1038/s41562-017-0256-5. ISSN 2397-3374. PMID 31024188. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-017-0256-5.
13. ↑ Bezalel, Glenn Y. (July 2020). "'Moral dumbfounding': Moral Foundations Theory for the classroom" (in en). Theory and Research in Education 18 (2): 191–210. doi:10.1177/1477878520934014. ISSN 1477-8785. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1477878520934014.
14. ↑ McHugh, Cillian; Zhang, Run; Karnatak, Tanuja; Lamba, Nishtha; Khokhlova, Olga (July 2023). "Just wrong? Or just WEIRD? Investigating the prevalence of moral dumbfounding in non-Western samples". Memory & Cognition 51 (5): 1043–1060. doi:10.3758/s13421-022-01386-z.
15. ↑ May, Joshua (July 2018) (in en). The Limits of Emotion in Moral Judgment. 1. Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/oso/9780198797074.003.0014. https://academic.oup.com/book/9276/chapter/156012648.
16. ↑ Fasko Jr, Daniel; Fair, Frank (January 2025). Critical Thinking in Moral Development: Philosophy, Psychology, Education, and Assessment. BRILL. doi:10.1163/9789004714052_003. ISBN 978-90-04-71404-5. https://brill.com/view/title/71248.
17. ↑ Bretl, Brandon L.; Goering, Marlon (January 2022). "Age- and sex-based differences in the moral intuitions of American early adolescents" (in en). Evolutionary Human Sciences 4: e33. doi:10.1017/ehs.2022.34. ISSN 2513-843X. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/evolutionary-human-sciences/article/age-and-sexbased-differences-in-the-moral-intuitions-of-american-early-adolescents/C8DA96743F92D701F0BF0A220CA013DE.
18. ↑ 18.0 18.1 18.2 Haidt, Jonathan (October 2001). "The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgement". Psychological Review 108 (4): 814–34. doi:10.1037/0033-295x.108.4.814. PMID 11699120. http://www.nd.edu/~wcarbona/Haidt 2001.pdf. Retrieved 2012-10-13.
19. ↑ Donleavy, Gabriel (July 2008). "No Man's Land: Exploring the Space between Gilligan and Kohlberg". Journal of Business Ethics 80 (4): 807–822. doi:10.1007/s10551-007-9470-9.
20. ↑ Haidt, Jonathan (2012) (in en). The Righteous Mind. Pantheon. ISBN 978-0-307-37790-6.
21. ↑ Shweder, Richard; Jonathan Haidt (November 1993). "Commentary to Feature Review: The Future of Moral Psychology: Truth, Intuition, and the Pluralist Way". Psychological Science 4 (6): 360–365. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.1993.tb00582.x.
22. ↑ 22.0 22.1 Haidt, Jonathan; Koller, Silvia Helena; Dias, Maria G. (1993). "Affect, culture, and morality, or is it wrong to eat your dog?". Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 65 (4): 613–628. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.65.4.613. PMID 8229648.
23. ↑ Miller, Greg (9 May 2008). "The Roots of Morality". Science 320 (5877): 734–737. doi:10.1126/science.320.5877.734. PMID 18467565.
24. ↑ Fiske, Alan P. (1992). "The four elementary forms of sociality: Framework for a unified theory of social relations.". Psychological Review 99 (4): 689–723. doi:10.1037/0033-295X.99.4.689. PMID 1454904.
25. ↑ Schwartz, Shalom H. (1992), "Universals in the Content and Structure of Values: Theoretical Advances and Empirical Tests in 20 Countries", Advances in Experimental Social Psychology Volume 25, 25, Elsevier, pp. 1–65, doi:10.1016/s0065-2601(08)60281-6, ISBN 978-0-12-015225-4
26. ↑ Haidt, Jonathan; Joseph, Craig (2007). "19 the Moral Mind: How Five Sets of Innate Intuitions Guide the Development of Many Culture-Specific Virtues, and Perhaps Even Modules". in Carruthers, P; Laurence, S; Stich, S. The Innate Mind, Volume 3: Foundations and the Future. Oxford University Press. pp. 367–391. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195332834.003.0019. ISBN 978-0-19-533283-4.
27. ↑ Haidt, Jonathan; Graham, Jesse (2009). "Planet of the Durkheimians, where community, authority, and sacredness are foundations of morality". in Jost, John; Kay, Aaron; Thorisdottir, Hulda. Social and psychological bases of ideology and system justification. Oxford University Press. pp. 371–401. ISBN 978-0-19-986954-1.
28. ↑ Atari, Mohammad; Graham, Jesse; Dehghani, Morteza (2020-09-01). "Foundations of morality in Iran". Evolution and Human Behavior. Beyond Weird 41 (5): 367–384. doi:10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2020.07.014. ISSN 1090-5138. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1090513820300933.
29. ↑ Barbaro, Nicole (2020-10-03). "Beyond WEIRD Morality" (in en-US). https://www.hbes.com/beyond-weird-morality/.
30. ↑ Atari, Mohammad; Haidt, Jonathan (2023-10-10). "Ownership is (likely to be) a moral foundation". The Behavioral and Brain Sciences 46. doi:10.1017/S0140525X2300119X. ISSN 1469-1825. PMID 37813408.
31. ↑ Kim, Kisok; Je-Sang Kang; Seongyi Yun (August 2012). "Moral intuitions and political orientation: Similarities and differences between Korea and the United States". PLOS ONE 111 (1): 173–185. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0050092. PMID 23251357.
32. ↑ Nilsson, Artur; Erlandsson, Arvid (April 2015). "The Moral Foundations taxonomy: Structural validity and relation to political ideology in Sweden". Personality and Individual Differences 76: 28–32. doi:10.1016/j.paid.2014.11.049.
33. ↑ Davies, Caitlin L.; Sibley, Chris G.; Liu, James H. (November 2014). "Confirmatory Factor Analysis of the Moral Foundations Questionnaire". Social Psychology 45 (6): 431–436. doi:10.1027/1864-9335/a000201.
34. ↑ Davis, Don E.; Dooley, Matthew T.; Hook, Joshua N.; Choe, Elise; McElroy, Stacey E. (2017). "The purity/sanctity subscale of the Moral Foundations Questionnaire does not work similarly for religious versus non-religious individuals.". Psychology of Religion and Spirituality 9 (1): 124–130. doi:10.1037/rel0000057.
35. ↑ Crone, Damien L.; Laham, Simon M. (2022-11-16). "Clarifying Measurement Issues With the Purity Subscale of the Moral Foundations Questionnaire in Christian and Nonreligious Participants" (in en). Social Psychological and Personality Science 14 (7): 845–853. doi:10.1177/19485506221136664. ISSN 1948-5506. http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/19485506221136664.
36. ↑ Davis, Don E.; Rice, Kenneth; Van Tongeren, Daryl R.; Hook, Joshua N.; DeBlaere, Cirleen; Worthington, Everett L.; Choe, Elise (2016). "The moral foundations hypothesis does not replicate well in Black samples.". Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 110 (4): e23–e30. doi:10.1037/pspp0000056. PMID 26348601.
37. ↑ Iurino, Kathryn; Saucier, Gerard (31 December 2018). "Testing Measurement Invariance of the Moral Foundations Questionnaire Across 27 Countries". Assessment 27 (2): 365–372. doi:10.1177/1073191118817916. PMID 30596252.
38. ↑ Atari, Mohammad; Haidt, Jonathan; Graham, Jesse; Koleva, Sena; Stevens, Sean T.; Dehghani, Morteza (2023-08-17). "Morality beyond the WEIRD: How the nomological network of morality varies across cultures." (in en). Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 125 (5): 1157–1188. doi:10.1037/pspp0000470. ISSN 1939-1315. PMID 37589704.
39. ↑ Graham, Jesse; Haidt, Jonathan (2012). "Sacred values and evil adversaries: A moral foundations approach". in Mikulincer, Mario; Shaver, Phillip R. The Social Psychology of Morality: Exploring the Causes of Good and Evil. APA Books. ISBN 978-1-4338-1011-4.
40. ↑ Clifford, Scott; Iyengar, Vijeth; Cabeza, Roberto; Sinnott-Armstrong, Walter (13 January 2015). "Moral foundations vignettes: a standardized stimulus database of scenarios based on moral foundations theory". Behavior Research Methods 47 (4): 1178–1198. doi:10.3758/s13428-014-0551-2. PMID 25582811.
41. ↑ Marques, Lucas Murrins; Clifford, Scott; Iyengar, Vijeth; Bonato, Graziela Vieira; Cabral, Patrícia Moraes; Barreto dos Santos, Rafaela; Cabeza, Roberto; Sinnott-Armstrong, Walter et al. (2020). "Translation and validation of the Moral Foundations Vignettes (MFVs) for the Portuguese language in a Brazilian sample". Judgment and Decision Making 15 (1): 149–158. doi:10.1017/S1930297500006963. http://journal.sjdm.org/19/190809a/jdm190809a.pdf.
42. ↑ Crone, Damien L.; Rhee, Joshua J.; Laham, Simon M. (1 October 2020). "Developing brief versions of the Moral Foundations Vignettes using a genetic algorithm-based approach". Behavior Research Methods 53 (3): 1179–1187. doi:10.3758/s13428-020-01489-y. PMID 33006066. http://psyarxiv.com/4csv9/.
43. ↑ Crone, Damien L.; Bode, Stefan; Murawski, Carsten; Laham, Simon M. (24 January 2018). "The Socio-Moral Image Database (SMID): A novel stimulus set for the study of social, moral and affective processes". PLOS ONE 13 (1). doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0190954. PMID 29364985. Bibcode: 2018PLoSO..1390954C.
44. ↑ Eden, Allison; Oliver, Mary Beth; Tamborini, Ron; Limperos, Anthony; Woolley, Julia (4 March 2015). "Perceptions of Moral Violations and Personality Traits Among Heroes and Villains". Mass Communication and Society 18 (2): 186–208. doi:10.1080/15205436.2014.923462.
45. ↑ Hopp, Frederic R.; Fisher, Jacob T.; Cornell, Devin; Huskey, Richard; Weber, René (14 July 2020). "The extended Moral Foundations Dictionary (eMFD): Development and applications of a crowd-sourced approach to extracting moral intuitions from text". Behavior Research Methods 53 (1): 232–246. doi:10.3758/s13428-020-01433-0. PMID 32666393. http://psyarxiv.com/924gq/.
46. ↑ Hoover, Joe; Johnson, Kate; Boghrati, Reihane; Graham, Jesse; Dehghani, Morteza (26 April 2018). "Moral Framing and Charitable Donation: Integrating Exploratory Social Media Analyses and Confirmatory Experimentation". Collabra: Psychology 4 (1): 9. doi:10.1525/collabra.129.
47. ↑ Matsuo, Akiko; Sasahara, Kazutoshi; Taguchi, Yasuhiro; Karasawa, Minoru; Gruebner, Oliver (25 March 2019). "Development and validation of the Japanese Moral Foundations Dictionary". PLOS ONE 14 (3). doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0213343. PMID 30908489. Bibcode: 2019PLoSO..1413343M.
48. ↑ Kennedy, Brendan; Atari, Mohammad; Mostafazadeh Davani, Aida; Hoover, Joe; Omrani, Ali; Graham, Jesse; Dehghani, Morteza (2021-07-01). "Moral concerns are differentially observable in language". Cognition 212. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104696. ISSN 0010-0277. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010027721001153.
49. ↑ Atari, Mohammad; Mostafazadeh Davani, Aida; Dehghani, Morteza (2020-01-08). "Body Maps of Moral Concerns" (in en). Psychological Science 31 (2): 160–169. doi:10.1177/0956797619895284. ISSN 0956-7976. PMID 31913779. http://psyarxiv.com/jkewf/.
50. ↑ Jonathan Haidt, Bill Moyers (3 February 2012). Jonathan Haidt Explains Our Contentious Culture (Television production). Lebanon: Public Square Media, Inc.
51. ↑ Haidt, Jonathan; Graham, Jesse (2007-06-01). "When Morality Opposes Justice: Conservatives Have Moral Intuitions that Liberals may not Recognize" (in en). Social Justice Research 20 (1): 98–116. doi:10.1007/s11211-007-0034-z. ISSN 0885-7466.
52. ↑ Sinn, J.S.; Hayes, M.W. (2017). "Replacing the Moral Foundations: An Evolutionary-Coalitional Theory of Liberal-Conservative Differences". Political Psychology 38 (6): 1043–1064. doi:10.1111/pops.12361.
53. ↑ Smith, Kevin B.; Alford, John R.; Hibbing, John R.; Martin, Nicholas G.; Hatemi, Peter K. (April 2017). "Intuitive Ethics and Political Orientations: Testing Moral Foundations as a Theory of Political Ideology". American Journal of Political Science 61 (2): 424–437. doi:10.1111/ajps.12255.
54. ↑ 54.0 54.1 54.2 Hatemi, Peter K.; Crabtree, Charles; Smith, Kevin B. (30 July 2019). "Ideology Justifies Morality: Political Beliefs Predict Moral Foundations". American Journal of Political Science 63 (4): 788–806. doi:10.1111/ajps.12448.
55. ↑ 55.0 55.1 55.2 Strupp-Levitsky, Michael; Noorbaloochi, Sharareh; Shipley, Andrew; Jost, John T. (10 November 2020). "Moral 'foundations' as the product of motivated social cognition: empathy and other psychological underpinnings of ideological divergence in 'individualizing' and 'binding' concerns". PLOS One 15 (11). doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0241144. PMID 33170885. Bibcode: 2020PLoSO..1541144S.
56. ↑ Hopp, Frederic; Amir, Ori; Fisher, Jacob; Grafton, Scott; Sinott-Armstrong, Walter; Weber, Rene (2023-09-07). "Moral foundations elicit shared and dissociable cortical activation modulated by political ideology" (in en). Nature Human Behaviour 7 (12): 2182–2198. doi:10.1038/s41562-023-01693-8. PMID 37679440. https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-2133317/v1.pdf.
57. ↑ Henrich, Joseph; Heine, Steven J.; Norenzayan, Ara (June 2010). "The weirdest people in the world?". Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33 (2–3): 61–83. doi:10.1017/S0140525X0999152X. PMID 20550733. https://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~henrich/pdfs/WeirdPeople.pdf.
58. ↑ "Moral foundations theory and its implications for the World Values Survey community" (in en-GB). https://www.uk-values.org/news-comment/moral-foundations-theory-wvs.
59. ↑ 59.0 59.1 Atari, Mohammad; Lai, Mark H. C.; Dehghani, Morteza (2020-10-28). "Sex differences in moral judgements across 67 countries". Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 287 (1937). doi:10.1098/rspb.2020.1201. PMID 33081618.
60. ↑ Schwartz, Shalom H.; Rubel, Tammy (December 2005). "Sex differences in value priorities: Cross-cultural and multimethod studies." (in en). Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 89 (6): 1010–1028. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.89.6.1010. ISSN 1939-1315. PMID 16393031. http://doi.apa.org/getdoi.cfm?doi=10.1037/0022-3514.89.6.1010.
61. ↑ Gignac, Gilles E.; Szodorai, Eva T. (2016-11-01). "Effect size guidelines for individual differences researchers" (in en). Personality and Individual Differences 102: 74–78. doi:10.1016/j.paid.2016.06.069. ISSN 0191-8869. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886916308194.
62. ↑ Rezapour, Rezvaneh; Dinh, Ly; Diesner, Jana (2021-08-29). "Incorporating the Measurement of Moral Foundations Theory into Analyzing Stances on Controversial Topics". Proceedings of the 32st ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media. HT '21. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. pp. 177–188. doi:10.1145/3465336.3475112. ISBN 978-1-4503-8551-0. https://doi.org/10.1145/3465336.3475112.
63. ↑ Kennedy, Brendan; Golazizian, Preni; Trager, Jackson; Atari, Mohammad; Hoover, Joe; Mostafazadeh Davani, Aida; Dehghani, Morteza (2023-07-03). Van Bavel, J. ed. "The (moral) language of hate" (in en). PNAS Nexus 2 (7). doi:10.1093/pnasnexus/pgad210. ISSN 2752-6542. PMID 37441615. PMC 10335335. https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/article/doi/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgad210/7220655.
64. ↑ Alvarez Nogales, Anny D.; Araque, Oscar (May 2024). Abercrombie, Gavin; Basile, Valerio; Bernadi, Davide et al.. eds. "Moral Disagreement over Serious Matters: Discovering the Knowledge Hidden in the Perspectives". Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Perspectivist Approaches to NLP (NLPerspectives) @ LREC-COLING 2024 (Torino, Italia: ELRA and ICCL): 67–77. https://aclanthology.org/2024.nlperspectives-1.7.
65. ↑ Frimer, Jeremy A. (February 2020). "Do liberals and conservatives use different moral languages? Two replications and six extensions of Graham, Haidt, and Nosek's (2009) moral text analysis". Journal of Research in Personality 84. doi:10.1016/j.jrp.2019.103906.
66. ↑ Atari, Mohammad; Mehl, Matthias R.; Graham, Jesse; Doris, John M.; Schwarz, Norbert; Davani, Aida Mostafazadeh; Omrani, Ali; Kennedy, Brendan et al. (2023-04-12). "The paucity of morality in everyday talk" (in en). Scientific Reports 13 (1): 5967. doi:10.1038/s41598-023-32711-4. ISSN 2045-2322. PMID 37045974.
67. ↑ Suhler, Christopher L.; Churchland, Patricia (September 2011). "Can Innate, Modular "Foundations" Explain Morality? Challenges for Haidt's Moral Foundations Theory". Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 23 (9): 2103–2116. doi:10.1162/jocn.2011.21637. PMID 21291315.
68. ↑ 68.0 68.1 Gray, Kurt; Young, Liane; Waytz, Adam (April 2012). "Mind perception is the essence of morality". Psychological Inquiry 23 (2): 101–124. doi:10.1080/1047840X.2012.651387. PMID 22754268. See also the many comments in the same issue and the authors' reply: Gray, Kurt; Waytz, Adam; Young, Liane (April 2012). "The moral dyad: a fundamental template unifying moral judgment". Psychological Inquiry 23 (2): 206–215. doi:10.1080/1047840X.2012.686247. PMID 22815620.
69. ↑ 69.0 69.1 Schein, Chelsea; Gray, Kurt (14 May 2017). "The Theory of Dyadic Morality: Reinventing Moral Judgment by Redefining Harm". Personality and Social Psychology Review 22 (1): 32–70. doi:10.1177/1088868317698288. PMID 28504021.
70. ↑ Gray, Kurt (2025). Outraged: Why We Fight About Morality and Politics and How to Find Common Ground. Pantheon. p. 368. ISBN 978-0-593-31743-3.
71. ↑ Haidt, Jonathan; Joseph, Craig (September 2011). "How Moral Foundations Theory Succeeded in Building on Sand: A Response to Suhler and Churchland". Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 23 (9): 2117–2122 [2117]. doi:10.1162/jocn.2011.21638.
72. ↑ Koleva, Spassena; Haidt, Jonathan (April 2012). "Let's Use Einstein's Safety Razor, Not Occam's Swiss Army Knife or Occam's Chainsaw". Psychological Inquiry 23 (2): 175–178. doi:10.1080/1047840X.2012.667678.
73. ↑ Janoff-Bulman, Ronnie; Carnes, Nate C. (16 March 2013). "Surveying the moral landscape: moral motives and group-based moralities". Personality and Social Psychology Review 17 (3): 219–236. doi:10.1177/1088868313480274. PMID 23504824. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236057322.
74. ↑ Rai, Tage Shakti; Fiske, Alan Page (2011). "Moral psychology is relationship regulation: Moral motives for unity, hierarchy, equality, and proportionality". Psychological Review 118 (1): 57–75. doi:10.1037/a0021867. PMID 21244187. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/49764236.
75. ↑ Verhulst, B.; Eaves, L. J.; Hatemi, P. K. (2012). "Correlation not causation: the relationship between personality traits and political ideologies". American Journal of Political Science 56 (1): 34–51. doi:10.1111/j.1540-5907.2011.00568.x. PMID 22400142.
76. ↑ Curry, Oliver Scott; Jones Chesters, Matthew; Van Lissa, Caspar J. (February 2019). "Mapping morality with a compass: Testing the theory of 'morality-as-cooperation' with a new questionnaire". Journal of Research in Personality 78: 106–124. doi:10.1016/j.jrp.2018.10.008.
77. ↑ Curry, Oliver Scott; Mullins, Daniel Austin; Whitehouse, Harvey (2 February 2019). "Is It Good to Cooperate? Testing the Theory of Morality-as-Cooperation in 60 Societies". Current Anthropology 60 (1): 47–69. doi:10.1086/701478. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:8dd8d82d-3829-4857-bcf4-eebf196d11be.
78. ↑ Nagel, Thomas (2 November 2013). "You Can't Learn About Morality from Brain Scans: The problem with moral psychology". New Republic. https://newrepublic.com/article/115279/joshua-greenes-moral-tribes-reviewed-thomas-nagel. Retrieved 24 November 2013.
79. ↑ Kollareth, Dolichan; Brownell, Hiram; Durán, Juan Ignacio; Russell, James A. (January 2023). "Is purity a distinct and homogeneous domain in moral psychology?" (in en). Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 152 (1): 211–235. doi:10.1037/xge0001274. ISSN 1939-2222. PMID 35901410.
80. ↑ 80.0 80.1 Kollareth, Dolichan; Russell, James A. (February 2019). "Disgust and the sacred: Do people react to violations of the sacred with the same emotion they react to something putrid?" (in en). Emotion 19 (1): 37–52. doi:10.1037/emo0000412. ISSN 1931-1516. PMID 29494201.
81. ↑ Beal, Bree (March 2020). "What Are the Irreducible Basic Elements of Morality? A Critique of the Debate Over Monism and Pluralism in Moral Psychology". Perspectives on Psychological Science 15 (2): 273–290. doi:10.1177/1745691619867106. PMID 31721660.
82. ↑ Feldman, Gilad (2021). "Personal Values and Moral Foundations: Examining Relations and Joint Prediction of Moral Variables" (in en). Social Psychological and Personality Science 12 (5): 676–686. doi:10.1177/1948550620933434. ISSN 1948-5506. http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1948550620933434.
83. ↑ Hawkins, Darren; Karpowitz, Christopher F.; Greene, Steven; Goodliffe, Jay; Graham, Logan; Bodily, Ashlyn (2026). "The Poverty of Moral Foundation Messaging" (in en). Political Communication. doi:10.1080/10584609.2026.2612739. ISSN 1058-4609. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10584609.2026.2612739.

| Scholia has a topic profile for Moral foundations theory.

|

## External links

* MoralFoundations.org

* v
* t
* e

Evolutionary psychology

* History

Processes|

* Altruism
* Coevolution
* Evolutionarily stable strategy
* Kin selection
* Natural selection
* Sexual selection
* Social selection

Areas|

* Psychological development
* Morality
* Religion
* Depression
* Educational psychology
* Evolutionary aesthetics
* Music
* Darwinian literary studies
* Evolution of emotion

Biologists/
Neuroscientists|

* John Crook
* Charles Darwin
* Richard Dawkins
* Jared Diamond
* W. D. Hamilton
* Peter Kropotkin
* Gordon Orians
* Jaak Panksepp
* Margie Profet
* Giacomo Rizzolatti
* Randy Thornhill
* Robert Trivers
* Carel van Schaik
* Claus Wedekind
* Wolfgang Wickler
* David Sloan Wilson
* E. O. Wilson
* George C. Williams
* Richard Wrangham

Anthropologists|

* Jerome H. Barkow
* Robert Boyd
* Napoleon Chagnon
* Gregory Cochran
* Robin Dunbar
* Daniel Fessler
* Mark Flinn
* Henry Harpending
* John D. Hawks
* Joseph Henrich
* Ruth Mace
* Daniel Nettle
* Stephen Shennan
* Donald Symons
* John Tooby
* Pierre van den Berghe

Behavioral economists/
Political scientists|

* Samuel Bowles
* Ernst Fehr
* Herbert Gintis
* Dominic D. P. Johnson
* Gad Saad

Literary theory/
Aesthetics|

* Joseph Carroll
* Denis Dutton

Psychologists/
Cognitive scientists|

* Simon Baron-Cohen
* Justin L. Barrett
* Jay Belsky
* David F. Bjorklund
* Paul Bloom
* Pascal Boyer
* Joseph Bulbulia
* David Buss
* Josep Call
* Anne Campbell
* Peter Carruthers
* Leda Cosmides
* Martin Daly
* Daniel Dennett
* Paul Ekman
* Anne Fernald
* Aurelio José Figueredo
* David C. Geary
* Gerd Gigerenzer
* Jonathan Haidt
* Judith Rich Harris
* Stephen Kaplan
* Douglas T. Kenrick
* Simon M. Kirby
* Robert Kurzban
* Michael T. McGuire
* Geoffrey Miller
* Darcia Narvaez
* Randolph M. Nesse
* Steven Neuberg
* David Perrett
* Steven Pinker
* Paul Rozin
* Mark Schaller
* David P. Schmitt
* Todd K. Shackelford
* Roger Shepard
* Peter K. Smith
* Dan Sperber
* Anthony Stevens
* Frank Sulloway
* Michael Tomasello
* Mark van Vugt
* Andrew Whiten
* Glenn Wilson
* Margo Wilson

Research centers/
organizations|

* Center for Evolutionary Psychology
* Human Behavior and Evolution Society
* Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
* Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences
* New England Complex Systems Institute

Related subjects
and articles|

* The Adapted Mind
* The Evolution of Human Sexuality
* Evolutionary Psychology
* Evolution and Human Behavior
* Biosocial criminology
* Criticism of evolutionary psychology
* Evolutionary anthropology
* Evolutionary medicine
* Evolutionary linguistics
* Evolutionary neuroscience
* Evolutionary psychology and culture
* Group selection
* Human evolution
* Memetics
* Primatology
* Sociobiology
* Sociocultural evolution

Lists|

* Evolutionary psychologists
* Evolutionary psychology research groups and centers
* Bibliography of evolution and human behavior

* Evolutionary psychology
* Psychology portal
* Evolutionary biology portal

0.00

(0 votes)

Original source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral foundations theory. Read more

|

Retrieved from "https://handwiki.org/wiki/index.php?title=Philosophy:Moral_foundations_theory&oldid=4356564"
*[v]: View this template
*[t]: Discuss this template
*[e]: Edit this template