Moral Foundations Theory

Value-oriented citizenship index: New extensions of Kelman and Hamilton's theory to prevent autocracy

In Crimes of obedience, Kelman and Hamilton argue that societies can be protected by the degeneration of authority only when citizenship is based on a strong values orientation. This reference to values may be the weakest point in their theory because they do not explicitly define these values. Nevertheless, their empirical findings suggest that the authors are referring to specific democratic principles and universal values (e.g., equality, fairness, harmlessness). In this article, a composite index known as the value-oriented citizenship (VOC) index is introduced and empirically analysed. The results confirm that the VOC index discriminates between people who relate to authority based on values rather than based on their role or on rules in general. The article discusses the utility of the VOC index to develop Kelman and Hamilton's framework further empirically as well as its implications for the analysis of the relationship between individuals and authority.

Emotions in Constitutional Institutions

The prevailing justification for constitutional institutions is that such institutions reflect and enable rational solutions to social problems. However, constitutions are constructed through emotionally driven processes that reflect both the public sentiments of the day and, at least to some extent, basic moral emotions. Historical examples from France and the United States demonstrate the role of such emotional processes in shaping the design of liberal constitutionalism. Further, constitutional law both sets and regulates emotional display rules; favors or disfavors certain emotional commitments; and, particularly through the formulation of fundamental human rights, reflects and shapes emotional moral judgments. The emotional contributors to constitutional design and interpretation may be called “constitutional sentiments.”

Political psychology

Political psychology is a dynamic field of research that offers a unique blend of approaches and methods in the social and cognitive sciences. Political psychologists explore the interactions between macrolevel political structures and microlevel factors such as decision-making processes, motivations, and perceptions. In this article, we provide a broad overview of the field, beginning with a brief history of political psychology research and a summary of the primary methodological approaches in the field. We then give a more detailed account of research on ideology and social justice, two topics experiencing a resurgence of interest in current political psychology. Finally, we cover research on political persuasion and voting behavior. By summarizing these major areas of political psychology research, we hope to highlight the wide variety of theoretical and methodological approaches of cognitive scientists working at the intersection of psychology and political science. WIREs Cogn Sci 2014, 5:373-385. doi: 10.1002/wcs.1293 For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website.

CONFLICT OF INTEREST

The authors have declared no conflicts of interest for this article.

Immorality East and West

What makes some acts immoral? Although Western theories of morality often define harmful behaviors as centrally immoral, whether this is applicable to other cultures is still under debate. In particular, Confucianism emphasizes civility as fundamental to moral excellence. We describe three studies examining how the word immoral is used by Chinese and Westerners. Layperson-generated examples were used to examine cultural differences in which behaviors are called “immoral” (Study 1, n = 609; Study 2, n = 480), and whether “immoral” behaviors were best characterized as particularly harmful versus uncivilized (Study 3, N = 443). Results suggest that Chinese were more likely to use the word immoral for behaviors that were uncivilized, rather than exceptionally harmful, whereas Westerners were more likely to link immorality tightly to harm. More research into lay concepts of morality is needed to inform theories of moral cognition and improve understanding of human conceptualizations of social norms.

Impure or Just Weird? Scenario Sampling Bias Raises Questions About the Foundation of Morality

Moral psychologists have used scenarios of abuse and murder to operationalize harm and chicken-masturbation and dog-eating to operationalize impurity. These scenarios reveal different patterns of moral judgment across harm and purity, ostensibly supporting distinct moral mechanisms, modules, or “foundations.” However, these different patterns may stem not from differences in moral content per se but instead from biased sampling that confounds content with weirdness and severity. Supporting this hypothesis, frequently used impurity scenarios are weirder and less severe than both harm scenarios (Study 1) and participant-generated impurity scenarios (Study 2). Weirdness and severity—not content—also appear to drive differences between act and character evaluations (Study 3). Also problematic for modular accounts are extremely high correlations between harm and impurity ( rs > .86), and findings that harm scenarios assess impurity better than researcher-devised impurity scenarios. Overall, patterns of moral judgment previously ascribed to distinct moral mechanisms may reflect domain-general moral cognition.

Explaining Away Differences in Moral Judgment

Moral judgments about harm versus impurity differ in a number of nonsuperficial ways, as shown by dozens of studies, conducted by dozens of separate research labs, using a wide variety of methods and stimuli. Gray and Keeney attempt to explain away these differences by arguing that the “confounds” of severity and typicality may account for them all. This comment examines the evidence for this claim. Severity and typicality are undoubtedly important factors for moral judgment, but Gray and Keeney fail to demonstrate that they account for any (much less all) of the harm/impurity differences in the literature. Correlated ratings of “harm” and “impurity” are redundant with severity (.93 ≤ rs ≤ .97), merely tracking overall wrongness. The conclusion that harm and impurity judgments don’t meaningfully differ at all, that all the functional and cognitive differences in the literature are “illusions” resulting from confounds and “sampling bias,” is entirely unwarranted by the present studies.

Hierarchy, Dominance, and Deliberation

Hierarchy and dominance are ubiquitous. Because social hierarchy is early learned and highly rehearsed, the value of hierarchy enjoys relative ease over competing egalitarian values. In six studies, we interfere with deliberate thinking and measure endorsement of hierarchy and egalitarianism. In Study 1, bar patrons’ blood alcohol content was correlated with hierarchy preference. In Study 2, cognitive load increased the authority/hierarchy moral foundation. In Study 3, low-effort thought instructions increased hierarchy endorsement and reduced equality endorsement. In Study 4, ego depletion increased hierarchy endorsement and caused a trend toward reduced equality endorsement. In Study 5, low-effort thought instructions increased endorsement of hierarchical attitudes among those with a sense of low personal power. In Study 6, participants’ thinking quickly allocated more resources to high-status groups. Across five operationalizations of impaired deliberative thought, hierarchy endorsement increased and egalitarianism receded. These data suggest hierarchy may persist in part because it has a psychological advantage.

To Feel or Not to Feel When My Group Harms Others? The Regulation of Collective Guilt as Motivated Reasoning

Four studies tested the proposition that regulation of collective guilt in the face of harmful ingroup behavior involves motivated reasoning. Cognitive energetics theory suggests that motivated reasoning is a function of goal importance, mental resource availability, and task demands. Accordingly, three studies conducted in the United States and Israel demonstrated that high importance of avoiding collective guilt, represented by group identification (Studies 1 and 3) and conservative ideological orientation (Study 2), is negatively related to collective guilt, but only when mental resources are not depleted by cognitive load. The fourth study, conducted in Italy, demonstrated that when justifications for the ingroup’s harmful behavior are immediately available, the task of regulating collective guilt and shame becomes less demanding and less susceptible to resource depletion. By combining knowledge from the domains of motivated cognition, emotion regulation, and intergroup relations, these cross-cultural studies offer novel insights regarding factors underlying the regulation of collective guilt.

Moral foundations and political attitudes: The moderating role of political sophistication

Political attitudes can be associated with moral concerns. This research investigated whether people's level of political sophistication moderates this association. Based on the Moral Foundations Theory, this article examined whether political sophistication moderates the extent to which reliance on moral foundations, as categories of moral concerns, predicts judgements about policy positions. With this aim, two studies examined four policy positions shown by previous research to be best predicted by the endorsement of Sanctity, that is, the category of moral concerns focused on the preservation of physical and spiritual purity. The results showed that reliance on Sanctity predicted political sophisticates' judgements, as opposed to those of unsophisticates, on policy positions dealing with equal rights for same-sex and unmarried couples and with euthanasia. Political sophistication also interacted with Fairness endorsement, which includes moral concerns for equal treatment of everybody and reciprocity, in predicting judgements about equal rights for unmarried couples, and interacted with reliance on Authority, which includes moral concerns for obedience and respect for traditional authorities, in predicting opposition to stem cell research. Those findings suggest that, at least for these particular issues, endorsement of moral foundations can be associated with political attitudes more strongly among sophisticates than unsophisticates.

A Constructionist Review of Morality and Emotions

Morality and emotions are linked, but what is the nature of their correspondence? Many “whole number” accounts posit specific correspondences between moral content and discrete emotions, such that harm is linked to anger, and purity is linked to disgust. A review of the literature provides little support for these specific morality–emotion links. Moreover, any apparent specificity may arise from global features shared between morality and emotion, such as affect and conceptual content. These findings are consistent with a constructionist perspective of the mind, which argues against a whole number of discrete and domain-specific mental mechanisms underlying morality and emotion. Instead, constructionism emphasizes the flexible combination of basic and domain-general ingredients such as core affect and conceptualization in creating the experience of moral judgments and discrete emotions. The implications of constructionism in moral psychology are discussed, and we propose an experimental framework for rigorously testing morality–emotion links.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis of the Moral Foundations Questionnaire

The Moral Foundations Questionnaire (MFQ) measures five universal moral foundations of Harm/care, Fairness/reciprocity, Ingroup/loyalty, Authority/respect, and Purity/sanctity. This study provided an independent test of the factor structure of the MFQ using Confirmatory Factor Analysis in a large New Zealand national probability sample (N = 3,994). We compared the five-factor model proposed by Moral Foundations Theory against alternative single-factor, two-factor, three-factor, and hierarchical (five foundations as nested in two second order factors) models of morality. The hypothesized five-factor model proposed by Moral Foundations Theory provided a reasonable fit. These findings indicate that the five-factor model of moral foundations holds in New Zealand, and provides the first independent test of the factor structure of the Moral Foundations Questionnaire.

Shifting liberal and conservative attitudes using moral foundations theory

People's social and political opinions are grounded in their moral concerns about right and wrong. We examine whether five moral foundations--harm, fairness, ingroup, authority, and purity--can influence political attitudes of liberals and conservatives across a variety of issues. Framing issues using moral foundations may change political attitudes in at least two possible ways: (a) Entrenching: Relevant moral foundations will strengthen existing political attitudes when framing pro-attitudinal issues (e.g., conservatives exposed to a free-market economic stance) and (b) Persuasion: Mere presence of relevant moral foundations may also alter political attitudes in counter-attitudinal directions (e.g., conservatives exposed to an economic regulation stance). Studies 1 and 2 support the entrenching hypothesis. Relevant moral foundation-based frames bolstered political attitudes for conservatives (Study 1) and liberals (Study 2). Only Study 2 partially supports the persuasion hypothesis. Conservative-relevant moral frames of liberal issues increased conservatives' liberal attitudes.

Morality in everyday life

The science of morality has drawn heavily on well-controlled but artificial laboratory settings. To study everyday morality, we repeatedly assessed moral or immoral acts and experiences in a large (N = 1252) sample using ecological momentary assessment. Moral experiences were surprisingly frequent and manifold. Liberals and conservatives emphasized somewhat different moral dimensions. Religious and nonreligious participants did not differ in the likelihood or quality of committed moral and immoral acts. Being the target of moral or immoral deeds had the strongest impact on happiness, whereas committing moral or immoral deeds had the strongest impact on sense of purpose. Analyses of daily dynamics revealed evidence for both moral contagion and moral licensing. In sum, morality science may benefit from a closer look at the antecedents, dynamics, and consequences of everyday moral experience.

Delineating the Influence of Emotion and Reason on Morality and Punishment

The present article examines the available literature on the association between emotion, conscious reasoning, morality, and punishment. Although conscious reasoning has traditionally been implicated in moral judgment, contemporary research suggests that emotions play a primary role in moral judgment. This article reviews the different lines of evidence supporting the role of emotion in moral decision-making. Disgust seems to be unique from other emotions in its ability to influence moral judgment. Immorality often elicits disgust, individuals sensitive to experiencing disgust tend to make more severe moral judgments, and experimental disgust inductions can influence judgments about moral violations. However, the extent to which the emotion-moral judgment association extends to decisions about punishment remains unclear. This review considers various concepts, including moral outrage, responsibility, and blameworthiness that may influence the extent to which emotion informs punishment decisions. The implications of these findings for current thinking on morality and punishment, and future directions for research are discussed.

Will the real fundamental difference underlying ideology please stand up?

Negativity bias explains many ideological differences, yet does not explain research such as conservatives' greater life satisfaction. Conservatives live in safer communities, perhaps to escape negative emotions, yet display numerous other community preferences unrelated to negativity. This tendency toward cognitive consistency can explain both these phenomena and many of the phenomena described in the target article.

Being bad in a video game can make us more morally sensitive

Several researchers have demonstrated that the virtual behaviors committed in a video game can elicit feelings of guilt. Researchers have proposed that such guilt could have prosocial consequences. However, this proposition has not been supported with empirical evidence. The current study examined this issue in a 2×2 (video game play vs. real world recollection×guilt vs. control) experiment. Participants were first randomly assigned to either play a video game or complete a memory recall task. Next, participants were randomly assigned to either a guilt-inducing condition (game play as a terrorist/recall of acts that induce guilt) or a control condition (game play as a UN soldier/recall of acts that do not induce guilt). Results of the study indicate several important findings. First, the current results replicate previous research indicating that immoral virtual behaviors are capable of eliciting guilt. Second, and more importantly, the guilt elicited by game play led to intuition-specific increases in the salience of violated moral foundations. These findings indicate that committing "immoral" virtual behaviors in a video game can lead to increased moral sensitivity of the player. The potential prosocial benefits of these findings are discussed.

The Moral Ties That Bind . . . Even to Out-Groups: The Interactive Effect of Moral Identity and the Binding Moral Foundations

Throughout history, principles such as obedience, loyalty, and purity have been instrumental in binding people together and helping them thrive as groups, tribes, and nations. However, these same principles have also led to in-group favoritism, war, and even genocide. Does adhering to the binding moral foundations that underlie such principles unavoidably lead to the derogation of out-group members? We demonstrated that for people with a strong moral identity, the answer is “no,” because they are more likely than those with a weak moral identity to extend moral concern to people belonging to a perceived out-group. Across three studies, strongly endorsing the binding moral foundations indeed predicted support for the torture of out-group members (Studies 1a and 1b) and withholding of necessary help from out-group members (Study 2), but this relationship was attenuated among participants who also had a strong moral identity.

The Implicit Legacy of American Protestantism

The heritage of a nation founded by devout Puritan Protestants has had wide-ranging effects on U.S. culture and, as experimental evidence suggests, continues to exert an implicit influence on the feelings, judgments, and behaviors of contemporary Americans. The United States is distinguished by a faith in individual merit and traditional values uncommon among economically developed democracies, both of which have been traced, in part, to the moral ideals of the founding Protestant communities. Calvinist Protestantism has further profoundly shaped American workways, including the moralization of work and the manifestation of professional norms that prescribe impersonal and unemotional workplace interactions. The implicit influence of traditional Protestant beliefs extends not only to devout American Protestants, but even to non-Protestant and less-religious Americans.

Mapping the moral maps: from alternate taxonomies to competing predictions

The Model of Moral Motives will be of great value to moral psychology, both for its conceptualization of the provide/protect distinction at different levels of analysis (intrapersonal, interpersonal, intragroup, intergroup) and for its usefulness in integrating multiple theoretical perspectives on morality. To the latter end, this commentary makes three suggestions for improvements to the model and its integration with Moral Foundations Theory: (a) clarify what the columns of the model represent, (b) modify the one-to-one mapping of moral foundations onto the cells of the model, and (c) specify testable predictions uniquely generated by the model. Possibilities for future empirical tests of competing predictions are discussed, with the long-term aim of adjudicating between different theoretical accounts of ideological differences and the moral domain.

Moral foundations predict religious orientations in New Zealand

The interplay between religion, morality, and community-making is a core theme across human experience, yet scholars have only recently begun to quantify these links. Drawing on a sample of 1512 self-identified religious - mainly Christian (86.0%) - New Zealanders, we used structural equation modeling to test hypothesized associations between Religious Orientations (Quest, Intrinsic, Extrinsic Personal, Extrinsic Social) and Moral Foundations (Care/Harm, Fairness/Cheating, Loyalty/Betrayal, Authority/Subversion, Sanctity/Degradation). Our results show, for the first time in a comprehensive model, how different ways of valuing communities are associated with different ways of valuing religion.

You May Think You’re Right … Young Adults Are More Liberal Than They Realize

Do people have biased perceptions of their political orientation? Based on the link between political conservatism and in-group loyalty, we predicted that people would underestimate their liberalism and that this effect would be more pronounced among political conservatives. Young adults indicated their self-perceived political orientation and completed an objective measure of political orientation, which placed them along a liberal-conservative continuum by comparing their attitudes on 12 core issues (e.g., gay marriage, welfare) to population norms. Participants showed a significant bias toward perceiving themselves as more conservative than they actually were, and this effect was more pronounced among independents and conservatives than liberals. Further, biased self-perceptions of political orientation predicted voting behavior in the 2012 Presidential Election after controlling for objective political orientation scores. Discussion highlights theoretical implications for self-knowledge research and practical implications for American politics more broadly.