Mapping the Moral Domain

By Jesse Graham, Brian A. Nosek, Jonathan Haidt, Ravi Iyer, Spassena P. Koleva, Peter H. Ditto. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2011

2,515 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The moral domain is broader than the empathy and justice concerns assessed by existing measures of moral competence, and it is not just a subset of the values assessed by value inventories. To fill the need for reliable and theoretically-grounded measurement of the full range of moral concerns, we developed the Moral Foundations Questionnaire (MFQ) based on a theoretical model of five universally available (but variably developed) sets of moral intuitions: Harm/care, Fairness/reciprocity, Ingroup/loyalty, Authority/respect, and Purity/sanctity. We present evidence for the internal and external validity of the scale and the model, and in doing so present new findings about morality: 1. Comparative model fitting of confirmatory factor analyses provides empirical justification for a five-factor structure of moral concerns. 2. Convergent/discriminant validity evidence suggests that moral concerns predict personality features and social group attitudes not previously considered morally relevant. 3. We establish pragmatic validity of the measure in providing new knowledge and research opportunities concerning demographic and cultural differences in moral intuitions. These analyses provide evidence for the usefulness of Moral Foundations Theory in simultaneously increasing the scope and sharpening the resolution of psychological views of morality.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Social Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a07c7aef60839bfb8b59a7067630f5d06288c0f1

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Citations in the corpus

Global Human Identification and Citizenship: A Review of Psychological Studies (2019, background): “Collective narcissism predicted less willingness to forgive in both countries (Hamer, McFarland, Penczek, et al., in preparation). Other attitudinal correlates are also relevant. Lee, Ashton, Choi, and Zachariassen (2015) found a correlation of .44 between IWAH and a measure of connectedness with na”
Concept Creep: Psychology's Expanding Concepts of Harm and Pathology (2016, background): “This foundation is strongly associated with political liberalism (Graham, Haidt, & Nosek, 2009), as well as with empathy and compassion (Graham et al., 2011).”
Who engages with moral beauty? (2013, methodology): “To answer this question we examined correlations of data from subsamples of the 5380 subjects from Study 1 who had completed the EBS, and four measures related to morality: the MIS (Aquino & Reed, 2002), the AGSC (Barriga et al. (2001), and the Fairness and Care subscales of the MFQ (Graham et al., ”
Impure or Just Weird? Scenario Sampling Bias Raises Questions About the Foundation of Morality (2015, result): “Considering the low reliability of moral judgments within MFT-defined content areas of harm (a ¼.51) and impurity (a ¼.75) revealed by past work (Graham et al., 2011, p. 372), the Spearman attenuation-corrected correlation between them (r ¼ 1.0)2 raises doubts about any empirical separation between…”
Getting Liberals and Conservatives to Go Green: Political Ideology and Congruent Appeals (2013, methodology): “An individualizing moral foundation uses the individual as the reference for morality and seeks to protect one from potential harm and being mistreated by others for the pursuit of social justice (Graham et al. 2011).”
Corporate social responsibility as a source of employee satisfaction (2012, background): “We frame our discussion in terms of morality rather than justice because morality provides a broad base of concerns that includes justice but also other moral concerns, such as harm, care, and purity (e.g., Gilligan, 1982; Graham et al., 2011; Haidt & Joseph, 2004; Kohlberg, 1969; Shweder et al., 19”
Engagement with natural beauty moderates the positive relation between connectedness with nature and psychological well-being (2014, background): “…that the YourMorals website provides an alternative to traditional sample populations and has served as the data source for a number of recent empirical articles (e.g., Glenn, Koleva, Iyer, Graham, & Ditto, 2010; Graham et al., 2011; Koleva, Graham, Haidt, Iyer, & Ditto, 2012; Zhang et al., 2014).”
Cross-Cultural Differences in a Global “Survey of World Views” (2015, methodology): “Included was the 22-item short form of the Moral Foundations Questionnaire (Graham et al., 2011), which assesses five major criteria used to distinguish right from wrong: Harm/Care, Justice/Fairness, Loyalty, Authority, and Purity/Divinity.”
The role of cognitive resources in determining our moral intuitions: Are we all liberals at heart?☆ (2011, background): “Previous research on moral intuitions (Graham et al., 2009, 2011; Haidt, 2007; Haidt & Graham, 2007; Joseph et al., 2009) has revealed that while both liberals and conservatives value the individualizing foundations, conservatives also value—while liberals discount—the binding foundations.”
Better Not Smile at the Price: The Differential Role of Brand Anthropomorphization on Perceived Price Fairness (2015, background): “This study is the first to demonstrate that brand anthropomorphization has important implications for perceptions of price fairness, a unique context that entails judgments of whether a person has been exploited (Graham et al. 2011).”
Moral character: What it is and what it does (2014, background): “…2008), there is now growing consensus among psychologists that what is right versus wrong should be conceptualized as that which regulates social relationships and facilitates group living (Graham et al., 2011; Greene, 2013; Haidt & Kesebir, 2010; Janoff-Bulman & Carnes, 2013; Rai & Fiske, 2011).”
An occasion for unselfing: Beautiful nature leads to prosociality (2014, methodology): “This website provides an alternative to traditional sample populations and has served as the data source for a number of recent empirical articles (e.g., students; Glenn, Koleva, Iyer, Graham, & Ditto, 2010; Graham et al., 2011; Koleva, Graham, Haidt, Iyer, & Ditto, 2012).”