2011/01/01 by Jesse Graham, Brian A. Nosek, Jonathan Haidt +3 · 12 citations
Neuroscience · Psychology · Social Sciences · #Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment #Cultural Differences and Values #Social and Intergroup Psychology #Psychology #Social psychology #Morality #Moral development #Moral reasoning #Moral psychology #Social cognitive theory of morality #Moral disengagement #Discriminant validity #Empathy #Harm #Construct validity #Value theory #Convergent validity #Epistemology #Psychometrics #Developmental psychology
paper · doi:10.1037/a0021847
openalex publication_date 2011/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/04
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 on the basis of a theoretical model of 5 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 we present new findings about morality: (a) Comparative model fitting of confirmatory factor analyses provides empirical justification for a 5-factor structure of moral concerns; (b) convergent/discriminant validity evidence suggests that moral concerns predict personality features and social group attitudes not previously considered morally relevant; and (c) 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.