The moral roots of liberals and conservatives - Jonathan Haidt
The scale you completed was a revision of the "Moral Foundations Questionnaire," (MFQ) developed by Jonathan Haidt, Sena Koleva, and Sean Stevens. The original measure was developed by Jonathan Haidt and Jesse GrahamThe scale is a measure of your reliance on and endorsement of six psychological foundations of morality that seem to be found across cultures. This revised scale asks a variety questions related to each foundation: 1) Care/Harm, 2) Fairness/Cheating, 3) Loyalty/Betrayal, 4) Authority/Subversion, 5) Purity/Degradation, and 6) Autonomy/Oppression. We suspect that the Fairness/Cheating foundation may consist of two kinds of fairness: Fairness as equity and fairness as equality. Thus, the revised MFQ also attempts to measure both potential forms of fairness. The idea behind the scale is that human morality is the result of biological and cultural evolutionary processes that made human beings very sensitive to many different (and often competing) issues. Some of these issues are about treating other individuals well and respecting them as individuals (care, fairness, and autonomy). Other issues are about how to be a good member of a group or supporter of social order and tradition (loyalty, authority, and purity). Haidt and Graham have found that political liberals generally place a higher value on the care and fairness foundations; they are very concerned about issues of harm and fairness (including issues of inequality and exploitation). Political conservatives care about harm and fairness too, but they generally score slightly lower on those scale items. The big difference between liberals and conservatives seems to be that conservatives score slightly higher on the loyalty foundation, and much higher on the authority and purity foundations. Libertarians appear to score highly on the autonomy foundation and lower (relative to liberals and conservatives) on the other foundations.
This difference seems to explain many of the most contentious issues in the culture war. For example, liberals support legalizing gay marriage (to be fair and compassionate), whereas many conservatives are reluctant to change the nature of marriage and the family. Conservatives are more likely to favor practices that increase order and respect (e.g., spanking, mandatory pledge of allegiance), whereas liberals often oppose these practices as being violent or coercive.
In the graph below,
your scores on each foundation are shown in green
(the 1st bar in each set of 4 bars). The scores of all liberals who have taken it on our site are shown in
blue