Moral foundations theory and its implications for the World Values Survey community
The UK WVS team have worked with Mohammad Atari and Jonathan Haidt to include the questions developed from Moral Foundations Theory in the UK study of WVS, asking the full updated question set for the first time in the UK.
The World Values Survey (WVS) is humanity’s preeminent tool for studying differences in values across countries, and also across time. It has been, in a sense, the Hubble telescope of the social sciences, providing us high-quality data about the entire “universe” of human values and attitudes across many regions, over several decades. As such, anything we can do to improve its resolution, or expand the parts of the light spectrum it can detect, will be a benefit to the social sciences.
In this essay we make the case that Moral Foundations Theory (MFT; Haidt & Joseph, 2004; Graham et al., 2013) offers a way to improve the resolution of the WVS, because it is a theory about human morality that was created to combine the universalistic approach of evolutionary psychology (that we are one evolved species) and the particularistic approach of cultural anthropology (that every society constructs its own complex webs of meaning, which are in constant states of flux).
MFT rests on four falsifiable claims about human morality: (a) nativism, (b) cultural learning, (c) intuitionism, and (d) pluralism. Nativism is the idea that there is a “first draft” of the moral mind, meaning that human morality is, to some interesting degree, organised in advance of experience. Cultural learning is the idea that this “first draft” gets edited during development within a particular cultural context. Intuitionism is the idea that intuitions come first –before conscious and often socially strategic reasoning about right and wrong (Haidt, 2001). In metaphorical terms, moral evaluations first happen in the “gut” and are then rationalised in the “head” (see Atari et al., 2020). Finally, pluralism is the idea that there were many recurrent challenges in our evolutionary history to facilitate cooperation and social life, therefore multiple “foundations” of moral intuition exist (Graham et al., 2013).
The pluralism claim of MFT draws on research on anthropology. It is the empirical claim that the moral domain is, in fact, broad and heterogenous, consistent with the philosophical arguments for pluralism offered by Isaiah Berlin, but in tension with long-standing efforts by Western philosophers and psychologists to reduce it to one central virtue or value, usually justice or care. In the original conceptualization of MFT, five moral foundations were proposed: Care, Fairness, Loyalty, Authority, and Purity. Our team recently revisited the theory and split the Fairness foundation into “Equality” and “Proportionality” (Atari et al., 2022). We also developed the Moral Foundations Questionnaire-2 (MFQ-2) to measure these six foundations, and demonstrated this tool’s reliability and validity across cultures. We are also exploring additional domains, such as liberty and property.
We think there are at least four topics of interest where MFT can help WVS researchers who are trying to explain global psychological diversity, and more broadly those interested in promoting democracy around the globe. These topics of interest are: (a) cross-cultural variation; (b) political differences and polarization; (c) cultural change; and (d) institutions and democracy.
Exploring cross cultural variation was the main goal of the founders of MFT (Haidt & Joseph, 2004; Haidt et al., 2009). A number of large-scale datasets (including data from our research site YourMorals.org) show substantial cross-national variation in the endorsement of moral foundations. For example, our recent study based on the MFQ-2 across 25 nations shows variations in both the endorsement and the structural network of moral foundations across cultures. Specifically, Purity and Loyalty are least endorsed in WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic; Henrich et al., 2010) nations, being substantially more salient in cultures such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Morocco (Atari et al., 2022). In terms of inter-relations between moral foundations, we found that the structural network of moral foundations is more segregated in more WEIRD cultures such as the US (for an example, see Figure 1).
Figure 1
The Network of Moral Foundations in the USA and Morocco: Exploratory Graph Analysis Indicates the Presence of Two Sub-Networks in the USA, But Only One General Network in Morocco (C = Care, L = Loyalty, A = Authority, Pu = Purity, E = Equality, Pr = Proportionality)
A second way in which MFT may be of use to the WVS community is that it has a long track record of illuminating political differences and polarization within nations (Graham et al., 2009; Kivikangas et al., 2021). Recent research at the intersection of cultural and social psychology points the importance of going beyond the “country as culture” oversimplification, and to study within-country variation across different populations. Research using the MFQ and other measures repeatedly finds that leftists or progressives prioritize the foundations of Care and especially Equality in their moral judgment, whereas conservatives consider all six foundations important, giving substantially higher ratings than leftists on Loyalty, Authority, and Purity. Interestingly, Proportionality has been shown to “bridge” liberal and conservative moral networks (Atari et al., 2022), as both sides of the spectrum value merit and effort. Differences in weighting of foundations between individuals of different ideologies lead liberals to sometimes consider conservatives’ decisions and political positions immoral when they are based on different definitions of morality, or different moral matrices (Haidt, 2012). The current global rise in political polarization (Draca & Schwarz, 2021; Orhan, 2022), which may be accelerated by social media, is making extremists on both sides more extreme and/or more influential, pushing them farther from the center and from constructive and pragmatic dialogue one step at a time. MFT can help track this polarization, and can be used to find common ground between liberals and conservatives (e.g., Feinberg & Willer, 2014)
The third topic for which MFT has important implications is cultural change. Recently, theorists have made the case that for psychology to develop into a mature science of human behavior, it needs to develop into a historical science (Atari & Henrich, 2022; Muthukrishna et al., 2021). The WVS community has done a great deal of excellent research to track societal changes using decades of WVS data. Future research can make use of this goldmine of survey data, in addition to other sources such as YourMorals.org, to study how different cultures change their moral matrix across time. Additionally, while self-report measures of moral foundations were developed fairly recently, one can use text-based measures of moral foundations (e.g., Moral Foundations Dictionary; Graham et al., 2009) to study historical corpora going back deep in history for hundreds or thousands of years. Given the WVS’s time-series nature, these data provide a perfect basis for examining moral change across time and space, further improving the temporal and spatial resolution of this Hubble telescope.
The fourth topic of interest where MFT may have important implications is institutions and democracy. Democratic institutions rest upon invisible cultural and moral pillars, such as individual liberty and the rule of law applied impartially to all individuals. Institutions are more easily transplanted than the moral norms on which they are founded (Henrich, 2020), but if democratic institutions are simply planted by occupying armies into cultures that don’t share the relevant moral norms, they are sure to fail. Our team’s ongoing cross-cultural research suggests that different countries’ political and economic institutions are built upon invisible moral foundations, and we know no better database than the WVS to provide insights into the complex dynamics between moral norms, institutions, and democracy. Notably, institutions and moral psychology change each other in complex feedback loops in historical time (Henrich, 2020) and WVS time-series data can be used to tease apart temporal dynamics between institutions and moral psychology.
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The addition of the Moral Foundations Questionnaire-2 to this UK wave of WVS is an exciting development, opening doors to new and potentially interesting psychological questions that can be answered using these data. We anticipate a great deal of synergistic research between the MFT and WVS communities that will allow us to peer into the depths and varieties of human morality. An MFT-equipped Hubble telescope of the social sciences will give us a powerful tool for detecting new wavelengths on the moral spectrum and for explaining the moral mosaic we observe in the world today.
References
Atari, M., & Henrich, J. (2022). Historical Psychology. Preprint available at https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/m8b9g
Atari, M., Haidt, J., Graham, J., Koleva, S., Stevens, S. T., & Dehghani, M. (2022). Morality Beyond the WEIRD: How the Nomological Network of Morality Varies Across Cultures. Preprint available at https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/q6c9r
Atari, M., Mostafazadeh Davani, A., & Dehghani, M. (2020). Body maps of moral concerns. Psychological Science, 31(2), 160-169.
Draca, M., & Schwarz, C. (2021). How polarized are citizens? Measuring ideology from the ground-up. Preprint available at http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3154431
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Henrich J. (2020). The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
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Kivikangas, J. M., Fernández-Castilla, B., Järvelä, S., Ravaja, N., & Lönnqvist, J. E. (2021). Moral foundations and political orientation: Systematic review and meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 147(1), 55.
Muthukrishna, M., Henrich, J., & Slingerland, E. (2021). Psychology as a historical science. Annual Review of Psychology, 72, 717-749.
Orhan, Y. E. (2022). The relationship between affective polarization and democratic backsliding: comparative evidence. Democratization, 29(4), 714-735.