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The ties that bind
The Ties that Bind:
How Five Moral Concerns Organize and Explain Political Attitudes
Spassena Koleva, University of California, Irvine
Jesse Graham. University of Virginia
Jonathan Haidt, University of Virginia
Ravi Iyer, University of Southern California
Peter H. Ditto, University of California, Irvine
May 22, 2009
[Manuscript under review. Comments welcome]
Abstract
Many commentators have noted that the issue positions taken by partisans in the “culture war”
seem at times to be contradictory, or at least conceptually unrelated in an obvious way. In this
paper we apply moral foundations theory (Haidt & Graham, 2007) to the prediction and
understanding of opinions on culture war issues. In two studies and across 20 such issues (e.g.
abortion, defense spending, gun control) we found that endorsement of the five moral
foundations predicted judgments about these issues over and above self-reported political
ideology, age, sex, and religious attendance. Our results indicate that moral intuitions –
particularly those about spiritual purity – may underlie, motivate, and unite partisan positions
across a broad range of issues.
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The Ties that Bind:
How Moral Concerns (Particularly Purity) Organize and Explain Political Attitudes
Imagine two Americans, Libby and Connie. Libby believes abortion should be legal and
supports tight restrictions on gun purchases, while Connie believes that the sanctity of fetal life
mandates the criminal prosecution of abortion doctors and believes that any restrictions on gun
purchases violate the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Which one of these two
people is more likely to favor capital punishment? Most Americans know intuitively that the
answer is Connie, because of her conservative stance on abortion and gun control. But what
makes these three positions hang together as conservative positions? Why is Connie for the death
penalty if she’s pro-life? And why does Libby believe in individual freedom in the case of
abortion but not in the case of gun purchases?
One possibility—the null hypothesis for our inquiry—is that there is no unifying
principle, other than the fact that the two major political parties have staked out opposing
positions on these issues. Perhaps individuals simply know what position the political “team”
they support has taken, and they adopt a menu of such positions even when some of them entail
internal contradictions (Converse, 1964). After all, people are more favorably disposed to a
policy position if they believe it was proposed by their own side than by the opposing one, even
if the policy content is kept identical (Cohen, 2003). But to suppose that either party could just as
well have adopted either side on any issue would be to adopt a doctrine of “equipotentiality” –
the old behaviorist idea that any response an animal can be linked with equal success to any
stimulus the animal can perceive.
Equipotentiality as a principle of learning has been shown to be false (Garcia & Koelling,
1966). People and other animals come “prepared” by evolution (Seligman, 1971) to learn some
connections effortlessly (e.g., to fear heights or snakes), whereas other connections are hard or
impossible to learn (e.g., to fear flowers; Mineka & Cook, 1988). Many political scientists and
psychologists have argued, essentially, that equipotentiality is false for political attitudes as well,
and that individual people are psychologically prepared (by their genes, their childhoods, their
personality characteristics, their positions in society, etc.) to adopt some policy positions more
easily than others (see for example, Alford, Funk, & Hibbing, 2008; Carney, Jost, Gosling, &
Potter, 2008; Duckitt, 2001). Such scholars reject the null hypothesis and search for coherence
among the issues by examining their fit with a variety of cognitive structures (e.g., Lakoff,
1996), epistemological orientations (Hunter, 1991), or personality traits, existential needs, and
motivated rationalizations (summarized by Jost, Glaser, Kruglanski, & Sulloway, 2003). We
agree with these authors. In this article, we reject the null hypothesis of equipotentiality, embrace
a version of psychological preparedness, and offer a novel method for conceptualizing and
measuring some of the psychological factors that predispose people to accept some positions
more easily than others. We describe five moral “foundations” and show that differential patterns
of endorsement of these foundations – particularly the “Purity/sanctity” foundation – predict
people’s attitudes (above and beyond their ideological self-ratings) on a wide range of culture
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war issues.
Three ways to reject equipotentiality in political attitudes
In his 1991 book Culture Wars, James Hunter noted a realignment occurring in American
politics in which divisions within major religious denominations were becoming more important,
while differences across denominations were shrinking. Orthodox Jews, conservative Catholics,
and evangelical Protestants sometimes found more in common with each other than with their
more liberal co-religionists, particularly on issues related to sex, gender, family life, and (what
was widely perceived to be) the debasement of popular culture.
Hunter proposed that underlying this new division was a fundamental disagreement over
the nature of moral authority. On one side of this “culture war” were the “orthodox,” who
believed that moral truths existed independently of human preferences, and were grounded in “an
external, definable, and transcendent authority” (Hunter, 1991, p. 44). For most people at the
orthodox end of the axis, that transcendent authority was God, but the orthodox impulse toward a
well-grounded and stable moral order could also anchor itself on such quasi-divine figures as the
Founding Fathers and the quasi-sacred texts they wrote. On the other side were the
“progressives,” who saw moral truths not as fixed but as works in progress, which had to be
reinterpreted by each generation for its own time. Once an individual took a position on the
nature of moral authority (whether because of childhood socialization or innate temperament –
Hunter took no position), that person would be “prepared” to adopt one side or the other on most
of the culture-war issues. Issues that pitted a traditional, bible-based, or standard-affirming
position vs. a modern, liberationist, or relativist position were especially prone to becoming
battlegrounds in the culture war1.
A second comprehensive attempt to reject the null hypothesis and explain the coherence
among partisan positions came from George Lakoff (1996) in his book Moral Politics. Lakoff
proposed that Americans generally construe the nation as a family, with government as a parent,
but they disagree on the cognitive model of the family that they prefer. Conservatives are those
who think of the ideal family as being headed by a “strict father,” and liberals are those more
prone to idealize families headed by a “nurturant parent.” When applied to politics, conservative
positions cohere because they tend to be those that impose strict discipline and “tough love” for
the children’s own good in a world full of danger and competition. Liberal positions cohere
because they are often attempts to provide the resources and freedom that individuals need to
develop their talents in a world that is relatively safe and cooperative.
Hunter and Lakoff both explain coherence among policy positions, but both assume that
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As soon as Hunter proposed his culture war thesis, critics attacked it and claimed that it was not supported by
empirical data. Survey data on controversial issues consistently revealed that Americans were mostly moderates neither orthodox nor progressivist (Wolf, 1998); furthermore, the long term trends rarely showed increases in
polarization (Fiorina, Abrams, & Pope, 2005). Hunter (2006) has responded to these criticisms, pointing out that
he claimed all along that most Americans are moderates, and also noting that the realignment of shared meanings,
which all parties agree has happened in the media and among political elites, does not necessarily imply that most
Americans are moving toward the extremes.
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any individual, if born into a different family, could have adopted either coherent set of
positions. In fact, Lakoff (2006) says that all people are to some degree biconceptual, able to
apply either family model, depending on how an issue is framed. In contrast, John Jost and his
colleagues offer a third way to reject the null hypothesis, arguing that basic personality traits
prepare some individuals to become conservative, others to become liberal. In a meta-analysis of
the psychological correlates of conservatism, Jost et al. (2003) found that conservatives
(compared to liberals) have higher needs for order, structure, and closure; they are lower on
tolerance of ambiguity, integrative complexity, and openness to experience, and they score
higher on measures of death anxiety and fear of threats to the stability of the social system. The
authors conclude that people with these traits are prone to adopt conservative political views
because such views protect them from the threats posed by change and the uncertainty change
brings. They use this model of conservatism as “motivated social cognition” to explain the sorts
of apparent paradoxes we raised at the start of this paper. Jost et al. (2003) propose that logic or
coherence is to be found not in the issues themselves, but in two overarching habits of minds
predisposed to conservatism: first and foremost, a resistance to or dislike of change, and
secondly, a tendency to accept (or even prefer) social inequality.
Beyond change and inequality: Moral Foundations Theory
Hunter (1991), Lakoff (1996), and Jost et al. (2003) begin from different points, yet all
converge on the idea that culture war coherence is to be found in conflicting attitudes toward
change vs. stability. The tension between stability (and the inequalities inherent in traditional
social hierarchies) vs. change appears in many cultures, for example in the creative tension
between the Hindu gods Shiva (destruction and change) and Vishnu (preservation and order). We
therefore find quite sensible the claim by Jost and colleagues that the primary psychological axis
of ideology is related to attitudes toward change and inequality.
However, we also believe that morality is multi-dimensional, and we undertook our
present inquiry to determine whether moral foundations theory (Haidt & Graham, 2007; Haidt &
Joseph, 2004) might reveal the influence of moral motives beyond those related to change vs.
stability. Moral foundations theory (based in part on the work of Fiske, 1991, and Shweder,
Much, Mahapatra, & Park, 1997), argues that human groups construct moral virtues, meanings,
and institutions in variable ways by relying, to varying degrees, on five innate psychological
systems. Each system (akin to the five kinds of taste receptors on the tongue) produces fast,
automatic gut-reactions of like and dislike when certain kinds of patterns are perceived in the
social world, which in turn guide moral judgments of right and wrong. The five systems, or
moral foundations, are Harm/care, Fairness/reciprocity, Ingroup/loyalty, Authority/respect, and
Purity/sanctity. The Harm/care foundation was shaped by our evolution as mammals with
attachment systems and an ability to recognize, dislike, and relieve suffering, as well as to
disapprove of those who cause harm. The Fairness/reciprocity foundation (shaped in all
likelihood by the process of reciprocal altruism; Trivers, 1971) makes us sensitive to issues of
equality and justice and leads us to frown upon acts and people that violate these principles. The
Ingroup/loyalty foundation is based on our sense of obligation and attachment to the groups we
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belong to (e.g. our family, company, team, church, or country), particularly when those groups
compete with other groups. The Authority/respect foundation was structured by millions of years
of primate and hominid evolution for life in hierarchically-structured communities which makes
us approve of individuals who fulfill the duties associated with their position on the social ladder.
Lastly, the Purity/sanctity foundation is based on the uniquely human emotions of disgust in
response not just to biological contaminants (e.g. feces or rotten food), but also to various social
elicitors like spiritual and physical corruption or the inability to control one’s base impulses (e.g.
lust, greed, sloth; see Shweder et al., 1997, on the “ethics of divinity”).
The five moral foundations are posited to be universally present, but the moralities that
people actually adhere to are complex and culturally variable constructions. Different societies
and subcultures build different moralities, and they do so in part by resting their moral virtues,
claims, and institutions to varying degrees on the five moral foundations. For example, studies
using moral foundations theory have found that the Harm and Fairness foundations are endorsed
more strongly by political liberals, whereas the Ingroup, Authority and Purity foundations are
more strongly endorsed by conservatives (Graham, Haidt, & Nosek, 2009; McAdams, Albaugh,
Farber, Daniels, Logan, & Olson, 2008; van Leeuwen & Park, in press). In short, morality is a
social construction, but one that is constructed out of heavily “prepared” materials (Haidt &
Graham, 2009).
Two of the foundations – Fairness and Authority – conceptually relate to acceptance of
inequality and change (going against traditions and institutional structures), respectively. And yet
many concerns that are related to the other three moral foundations seem likely to influence
opinions on a number of controversial issues, e.g. the use of torture in interrogations (Harm),
illegal immigration (Ingroup), or same-sex marriage and other aspects of sexual morality
(Purity). Even after knowing a person’s ideology, from which we can predict his/her attitudes
about change and inequality, can moral foundations theory help us identify additional “moral
threads” that tie together Americans’ attitudes toward culture-war issues?
Study 1: Moral Disapproval
For our first study, we began in the most direct way possible: we measured individuals’
moral disapproval for thirteen controversial behaviors and we examined the degree to which
these disapproval scores were predicted by demographic factors, political ideology (liberal to
conservative), and scores on the Moral Foundations Questionnaire. We wanted to see what, if
anything, these moral foundations scores might add above and beyond political ideology and
demographic factors such as age and sex.
Method
Participants
Participants were 59712 adults residing in the U.S. who volunteered at
2
This sample of 5971 does not include 1923 participants who completed the surveys for this study as well as the
“Political Attitudes Questionnaire” that is described and analyzed in Study 2. Those 1923 participants are
analyzed only in Study 2. The current sample also excludes 1180 participants who selected “Libertarian,”
“Other,” or “Don’t know/not political,” for their political orientation. These participants were excluded because
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http://www.yourmorals.org. All participants had previously registered at the site, providing
demographic information including age (mean age = 39 years), sex (63% male), religious
attendance (M = .82, SD = 1.05 on a scale ranging from 0 = “never” to
3 = “one or more times each week”), and political orientation (M = 2.83, SD = 1.59, on scale
ranging from 1 = “very liberal” to 7 = “very conservative”).
Participants self-select to take one or multiple surveys from a list of 15-20 available at
any one time. The majority of visitors to the site begin with the first survey, the Moral
Foundations Questionnaire. Many visitors take additional surveys as well. Here we report results
only for those who completed both the Moral Foundations Questionnaire and a second survey,
identified by the label “Presidential Candidates and Morality Survey.”
Materials
The Moral Foundations Questionnaire (MFQ; Graham, Nosek, Haidt, Iyer, Koleva, &
Ditto, 2009) is a 30-item self-report measure of the extent to which an individual endorses each
of the five types of moral concerns: Harm/care, Fairness/reciprocity, Ingroup/loyalty,
Authority/respect, and Purity/sanctity. The scale consists of two sections. In the first, participants
rate how relevant each of 15 concerns are to them when making moral judgments, such as
“Whether or not some people were treated differently from others” for Fairness. In the second
section, participants rate their agreement with statements that embody or negate each foundation,
e.g., “It is more important to be a team player than to express oneself” for Ingroup (the items for
the MFQ can be found at www.moralfoundations.org). Six items per foundation (three from each
section) were averaged to produce a score for each person on each foundation. Cronbach’s
reliability statistics were as follows: Harm α = .67, Fairness α = .67, Ingroup α = .70, Authority
α = .75, and Purity α = .84.
In the “Presidential Candidates and Morality Survey,” participants were asked to answer
questions concerning thirteen social issues. The instructions and items for this scale were based
on a Gallup poll that was conducted in May of 2007 (http://www.pollingreport.com/values.htm).
The instructions read: “Here is a list of controversial issues. Regardless of whether or not you
think it should be legal, for each one, please indicate whether you personally believe that in
general it is morally acceptable or morally wrong.” Responses were measured on a scale from
“1 = Morally acceptable in most or all cases” to “5 = Morally wrong in most or all cases.” Items
appeared in an order randomized for each participant. The thirteen issues were abortion, the
death penalty, medical testing with animals, euthanasia, same-sex marriage, homosexual
relations, burning a U.S. flag, having a baby outside of marriage, stem-cell research,
pornography, gambling, casual sex, and animal cloning.
Results
To answer our research question – do the moral foundations help explain moral
disapproval on culture war issues beyond ideological partisanship – we used multiple regression.
Disapproval ratings for each issue were regressed on all four demographic variables (age, sex,
religious attendance, and political orientation) and all five moral foundation scores. The
we used the continuous 1-7 liberal-conservative scale as a covariate throughout.
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simultaneous inclusion of all foundations in the model created a challenging test for the
foundations, given that they are all intercorrelated (mean |r| = .32; range .01 to .67) and all
correlated with political orientation (mean |r| = .48; range .35 to .58), age (mean |r| = .09; range
.05 to = .12), gender (mean |r| = .08; range .05 to = .27), and religious attendance (mean |r| = .25;
range .00 to .52). (In addition, to ensure that the integrity of the regression models was not
threatened by the interdependence among the predictors we obtained collinearity diagnostics.
The tolerance values tended to be high and none was below .20, thus there was no indication of
multicollinearity). Betas for each foundation therefore show what each foundation adds to moral
disapproval ratings, above and beyond age, sex, religious attendance, ideology, and the other
four foundations. The results are summarized in Table I.
Demographics Predict Issue Disapproval
Not surprisingly, ratings on these controversial social issues were uniquely associated
with one’s political ideology (mean |β| = .219, range .005 to .373); only medical testing on
animals, cloning, gambling, and using pornography had betas less than .20. This confirms that
these issues are appropriate for the investigation of partisanship. Religious attendance was a
moderate unique predictor (mean |β| = .151; range .006 to .277) for most issues, particularly
those related to sexuality, but typically weaker than political orientation. More frequent church
attendance uniquely predicted stronger disapproval for all issues except for flag burning (no
relationship) and animal testing (slight reverse relationship). In contrast to religious attendance,
age (mean |β| = .053; range .003 to .118) and sex (mean |β| = .075; range .025 to .207) were weak
predictors of moral disapproval.
Moral Foundations Predict Issue Disapproval Beyond Demographics
As seen in Table I, Purity emerged as the foundation that best predicted disapproval on
culture-war issues. It was by far the best predictor of disapproval for issues dealing with
sexuality (casual sex, and using pornography), relationships and marriage (same-sex relations,
same-sex marriage, and baby outside marriage), and the sanctity of life (abortion, euthanasia,
stem-cell research, and cloning). Purity was also the strongest predictor of disproval of gambling
and flag-burning. Lastly, betas for Purity were generally much higher than those for the other
foundations (greater than .30 for 6 issues).
Harm was the strongest predictor for increased disapproval of medical testing on animals
and the death penalty. Harm was also the second best-predicting foundation (after Purity) for
disapproval of cloning animals.
Lastly, although Fairness, Ingroup, and Authority were statistically significant predictors
of moral disapproval for many issues, they were not the top predictors for any of them. Ingroup
was the second strongest foundation, after Purity, in predicting flag-burning. None of the betas
for Fairness were above .07, and for Authority only one beta (predicting death penalty) was
above .10.
Importantly, for nine of the thirteen issues, moral disapproval was best predicted by a
moral foundation, and not by political ideology (at least in terms of the absolute values of the
betas). Moreover, for two of the four issues best predicted by ideology, a moral foundation came
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in as close second. Only moral disapproval for the death penalty was clearly predicted better by
political ideology than any of the moral foundation indices.
Discussion
The results of Study 1 support the utility of moral foundations theory—and the Purity
foundation in particular—for understanding the organization of political attitudes. For 9 of the 13
culture war issues we studied, the strongest predictor was a subscale of the MFQ, usually Purity,
rather than political orientation, age, sex, or religious attendance. Even for perennially and hotly
contested issues such as flag-burning and abortion, Purity was a comparable predictor to political
orientation.
These results suggest that people’s stands on these topics are not entirely driven by their
ideological team memberships. Clearly, political orientation does account for substantial unique
variance in most of the issues examined. But the fact that endorsement of moral foundations
explained a great deal of variance in attitudinal position beyond the liberal-conservative
dimension allows us to reject the null hypothesis that any side of any issue could be adopted by
either team.
A second implication is that there is a great deal of texture to many of these political
issues, and sometimes the moral concern that is most visible on the surface may not be the only
one at work. Jost et al. (2003) may be correct that resistance to change and acceptance of
inequality are two common threads, but Table I shows the operation of multiple moral threads, to
varying degrees across the varying issues. For example, opposition to pornography seems to be
related primarily to purity concerns; no other predictor is a close second. In contrast, opposition
to flag burning is both more partisan and more complex. As one might expect, political ideology
and the Ingroup foundation were solid predictors on this issue, but the independent and sizable
contribution of the Purity foundation suggests that individual differences in the tendency to hold
objects sacred is at work too. People with low scores on this foundation may have difficulty
understanding why anyone would want to amend the U.S. Constitution to protect a piece of cloth
from harm, while people who score high might be baffled by the pointless profanity of
destroying a symbol of the nation.
Interestingly, in some cases the most obvious foundation was not a strong unique
predictor of attitudes. For example, political arguments about the morality of abortion, cloning,
and research using stem cells are often dominated by claims about harm or potential harm; yet
for all three issues, Purity scores were far better predictors of moral disapproval than harm
scores. This suggests that rationales given for or against a given position may sometimes be only
loosely connected to the intuitions that motivated the attitude in the first place (Haidt, 2001;
Nisbett & Wilson, 1977).
In sum, in the absence of information about a person’s political orientation, one can make
relatively textured predictions of people’s attitudes on culture war issues using moral foundations
theory, and Purity scores in particular. Furthermore, moral foundations theory helps us go
beyond prediction and understand some of the underlying moral threads that hold political
opinions together.
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Study 2: Issue Positions
In Study 1, participants were asked to set aside their beliefs about legality and simply tell
us whether they thought certain behaviors were immoral. We presume that such ratings draw
heavily on people’s gut reactions, the rapid intuitions of condemnation that often arise
immediately and automatically when people make moral judgments (Haidt, 2001). In study 2 we
investigated people’s more reasoned judgments about what kinds of laws or policies they would
like to see implemented. For example, a person might condemn abortion on personal moral
grounds, yet believe that outlawing it would result in dangerous illegal abortions. Such a person
might therefore support policies and candidates that are pro-choice.
Furthermore, we wondered if Purity’s dominance as a predictor was partially due to our
choice of items; many of the issues in Study 1 can be linked to sexuality and self-control, even if
only indirectly (e.g., gay marriage and abortion). Thus, we wanted to broaden the range of
culture war issues examined to include more issues unrelated to sexuality.
Lastly, sometimes Likert-type questions on abstract topics such as politics can appear
vague and confusing to participants and lack ecological validity. Large-scale media polls (e.g.,
Pew, Gallup, American National Election Studies) often forgo Likert scales and instead ask
individuals to choose from a list of concrete statements the one that comes closest to their view
on a specific contested issue. We used this methodological strategy in Study 2 to investigate the
relationship between the five moral foundations and people’s concrete positions on culture war
issues.
Method
Participants
Participants were 3,089 adult U.S. residents who self-selected to take both The Moral
Foundations Questionnaire and a survey called “Political Attitudes Questionnaire” which was
posted at www.yourmorals.org. As in Study 1, participants had previously provided their age
(mean age = 38), gender (64 % male), religious attendance (M = .78, SD = 1.04 on a scale
ranging from 0 = “never” to 3 = “one or more times each week”), and political orientation (M =
2.89, SD = 1.71, on scale ranging from 1= “very liberal” to 7 = “very conservative”). As in Study
1, 788 participants who selected “Libertarian,” “Other,” or “Don’t know/not political” were not
included in our analyses because the 7-point liberal-conservative scale was used as a covariate.
Materials
Age, sex, religious attendance, political orientation, and endorsement of the five moral
foundations were assessed using the registration items and MFQ described in Study 1. As in
Study 1, the five foundations correlated with each other (mean |r| = .36; range .05 to .71),
political orientation (mean |r| = .52; range .36 to .62), age (mean |r| = .09; range .02 to .15),
gender (mean |r| = .13; range .02 to .27), and religious attendance (mean |r| = .28; range .00 to
.56). Once again there was no indication of multicollinearity.
The reliability coefficients for the MFQ subscales were as follows: Harm α = .68,
Fairness α = .68, Ingroup α = .75, Authority α = .78, and Purity α = .87.
Issue positions were measured with eleven items adapted from a number of nationally-
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representative polls by Gallup, the New York Times, Pew Research Center, and other large
polling organizations. We sought to include items that captured a broad range of common culture
war issues. The first page gave participants these instructions: “The following questions address
eleven controversial political issues. Individual opinions on these topics vary widely and there
are no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ answers.” Participants were then given the eleven issues and asked to
select specific positions. For example, the item on gay marriage asked participants’ opinions on
whether same-sex couples should be allowed to legally marry, to have a civil union but not
marriage, or neither. For all items, an additional “Don’t know” answer option was available in
order to avoid forcing participants into taking a position; participants who selected this option
were excluded from analyses on that issue. The eleven issues were abortion, defense spending,
teaching evolution, same-sex marriage, the use of torture, global warming, burning a U.S. flag,
stem-cell research, combating terrorism, illegal immigration, and gun control. Items were
presented in an order randomized for each participant and the exact wording of each item can be
seen in the Appendix.
Results
Six of the 11 issues – shown in Table II —had three or more answer options that
progressed from a more liberal to a more conservative stand and were therefore treated as
continuous outcome variables with higher numbers indicating a more conservative stand. (These
variables are closer to an ordinal rather than interval scale, so we performed additional analyses
using Ordinal Logistic Regression. The pattern of results was almost identical to the one
obtained with ordinary least-square regression. Therefore, for ease of presentation and
interpretation we report only the ordinary least-squares results.) For each issue we
simultaneously entered age, sex, religious attendance, political orientation, and the five
foundations as predictors in an ordinary least square regression.
The remaining five issues had only 2 answer options and were therefore analyzed using
logistic regression (0 = liberal position, 1 = conservative position). For these regressions we
report the odds ratios. Age, sex, religious attendance, political orientation, and the five
foundations were simultaneously entered as predictors. These results are shown in Table III.
Demographic Predictors
As can be seen from Tables II and III, political orientation was again a significant and
relatively strong predictor of each of the 11 attitude positions (mean |β| = .394, range .246 to
.537, mean odds ratio = 1.77, range 1.39 to 2.17), and for 7 of the 11 issues it was the strongest
of all nine predictors. All relationships were in the expected directions (i.e. more conservative
individuals chose the more conservative issue positions). This confirms that these issues are
indeed part of the liberal-conservative split in the culture war.
In general, age, sex, and religious attendance were not strong predictors of issue position.
However, frequent religious attendance predicted more conservative views on abortion and stemcell research, and males were 63% more likely than women to support confrontation with
countries that promote terrorism.
Moral Foundation Predictors
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Compared to Study 1, attitude items in Study 2 showed a wider set of relationships to the
five foundations, confirming that we succeeded in broadening our sampling of culture-war
issues. Purity was still the most reliable predictor (significant at p < .001 on 7 of the 11 issues),
but Ingroup and Harm also emerged as important predictors (each significant at p < .001 on 4 of
the 11 issues). Purity was the best foundation-predictor of endorsing stricter abortion laws
(β = .31, p < .001), adopting a ban on same-sex marriage (β = .38, p < .001), and the teaching of
intelligent design/creationism in public schools (β = .30, p < .001). In addition, for one scalepoint increase in this foundation, the odds of choosing the conservative stand on stem-cell
research, illegal immigration, and flag-burning increased by 136%, 71%, and 30%, respectively.
Ingroup was the strongest foundation- predictor of support for increased defense spending
(β = .18, p < .001); in addition, a scale-point increase in this foundation raised the odds of
supporting military confrontation with countries that condone terrorism by 49%, raised the odds
of opposing gun control by 25%, and more than doubled the odds of favoring a ban on flagburning.
Concerns about Harm were the strongest foundation-predictor of support for tougher
measures against global warming (β = -.14, p < .001), and for one unit increase in Harm scores,
the odds of opposing gun control decreased by a third. Authority and Harm scores were equally
strong unique predictors of approval for forceful interrogation, but in the opposite directions
(Harm β = - .147, p < .001; Authority β = .151, p < .001). Authority scores also predicted seeing
illegal immigrants as weakening, rather than strengthening, the U.S. economy (odds ratio = 1.32,
p < .01). As in Study 1, the Fairness foundation was not the top predictor for stands on any of the
issues but it was significantly and negatively associated with endorsement of forceful
interrogation.
Discussion
The results of Study 2 clearly support our hypothesis that people’s scores on the five
moral foundations help predict their political attitudes above and beyond their demographic
characteristics and political orientation. Ten of the eleven issues were significantly associated (at
p < .01) with at least two moral foundations. In fact, one or more of the moral foundations were
better predictors (in absolute terms) than sex, age, or religious attendance for all issues.
Furthermore, a moral foundation was a better or comparable predictor than one’s ideological
self-placement for four of the eleven issues (same-sex marriage, teaching creationism, stem-cell
research, and flag-burning). Nevertheless, for seven of the issues ideology remained the strongest
attitude predictor, suggesting that specific stands on politically divisive issues tend to fall, as a
first approximation, along party lines. In short, if a researcher can get access to just one score,
political orientation is the most useful single score for predicting specific positions. But if a
researcher wants to know more about the motivations behind these positions, or why there is
diversity even among partisans on either side, the Moral Foundations Questionnaire can help.
In most cases, MFQ scores reveal the motives one might expect. For example, for issues
related to sexuality (same-sex marriage) and sanctity of life (abortion, stem cell research) the
variance beyond politics was mostly captured by the Purity foundation. For issues related to
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12
nationalism and national security (defense spending, using torture, confronting terrorism, and
flag burning), the variance beyond politics was best captured by the Ingroup foundation.
But a big advantage of collecting moral foundation scores is that they reveal the multiple
and sometimes conflicting motives at work, particularly when one examines the pattern on all
five foundations. For example, the use of torture elicited very similar betas for the Harm,
Ingroup, and Authority foundations. This pattern suggests that variation in attitudes about the use
of torture is due to the conflict of many different moral intuitions, including (perhaps) horror at
the pain inflicted, the need for Americans to get tough on their enemies, and the perceived value
of deferring to the authority of the president and the military in times of war.
Attitudes about illegal immigration also revealed an interesting pattern: opposition to
illegal immigration was predicted equally well by scores on Authority and Purity; this suggests
that individuals who view illegal immigrants as weakening the U.S. economy (the socially
conservative position) might also fear that immigrants will subvert American traditions and order
(Authority), and bring in dangerous and polluting foreign elements (Purity). Furthermore, proimmigration attitudes were predicted by Harm but not Fairness, suggesting that pro-immigration
sentiment is based more on compassion for the poor than on a sense that illegal immigrants
should have rights equal to those of citizens.
General Discussion
We examined the relationship between individuals’ moral judgments and their views on a
number of culture war issues. In Study 1 we focused on gut-level disapproval ratings on topics
ranging from the death penalty to using pornography, and showed that even when controlling for
a number of demographic variables and political ideology, the five moral foundations explain
unique variance in disapproval of the various issues. In Study 2 we went beyond abstract scale
responses by examining the ability of the five moral foundations to predict support for specific
policies on culture war issues, and once again the foundations proved useful in predicting and
interpreting responses.
Most of what we know about the nature and structure of ideological beliefs comes from
research in political science and sociology, which tend to focus on group-level explanations
based on demographic differences such as age, sex, income, ethnicity, etc. In contrast, the
current studies aimed to look beyond these important group-level variables and analyze the
additional contribution of knowing an individual’s moral profile.
The moral threads linking political attitudes
So what holds opinions on controversial political issues together? Some researchers have
suggested that politics is largely a “team sport,” thus how one feels about a given issue is largely
determined by one’s party’s stand on that issue (Cohen, 2003). Decades of research in social
psychology support this notion, as groups can exert powerful influence over one’s opinions and
behavior (Asch, 1955). Our results support this notion as well as evidenced by the consistent
relationship found between liberal-conservative political orientation and moral and political
attitudes. However, we believe that this is not the entire picture. It is still unclear why a person
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13
chooses one “team” over another, and psychological research is just beginning to examine the
personality (Carney et al, 2008), physiological (Oxley et al., 2008) and genetic (Alford et al,
2008) traits that may predispose individuals toward liberal or conservative ideologies. Whatever
the reasons why people end up on one team or the other (or on no team), our studies support the
view that equipotentiality does not apply to political attitudes. There is a psychological and
moral structure to many issues, and moral foundations theory may be useful in illuminating why
some issues positions go together, even when they seem, in their surface content, to contradict
each other.
Both studies speak most clearly to the importance of physical and spiritual purity as
concerns related to many social controversies. Purity scores were most strongly associated with
issues related to sexuality and relationships (same-sex relations and marriage, casual sex,
pornography, and having a baby outside of marriage) and the sanctity of life (abortion, cloning,
euthanasia, and stem-cells research). Interestingly, in addition to the strong unique effect of
political ideology, the moral reprehensibility of the death penalty appeared to be driven not by
Purity (the sanctity of life), but by Harm, perhaps suggesting that opponents of the death penalty
are more likely to imagine the harm committed in the moment of execution (or the potential
harm of wrongful convictions), rather than the harm committed by the murderer in the first place.
However, euthanasia, which also involves state sanctioned killing (and, like the death penalty,
might engender concerns over wrongful use) remains firmly linked to Purity and only very
weakly to Harm. This dominating importance of Purity concerns is surprising. Conceptually and
empirically, this moral foundation is closely related to religiosity. Still, the low church
attendance reported by our participants implies relatively low levels of religiosity. Thus, it is not
religious beliefs per se, but perhaps some more general moral sensitivity to issues of sanctity,
self-transcendence, even self-control, that may drive these results.
Not surprisingly, the Ingroup foundation held together views on foreign policy issues,
such as defense spending, the use of forceful interrogation/torture, and confronting terrorism. It
appears that these three draw on a common set of moral intuitions—about strengthening the
group as it confronts its enemies—even though on the surface these issues bring up very
different concerns, e.g. budgetary deficits, human rights, and foreign relations. No wonder, then,
that Ingroup scores were also a strong predictor (along with Purity) of positions on flag-burning,
for those who think it a moral imperative to strengthen the nation would most want to honor and
protect the sacred symbol of the nation.
The Harm foundation appeared to cast a moral net over the death penalty, medical testing
on animals, gun control, and global warming. Disapproval for the first two might be driven by an
overarching concern with any group—prisoners or animals—that has no voice and is thus
vulnerable to human error or inhumane treatment. The fact that support for stricter gun control
and emissions standards also related to the Harm foundation suggests that hurting the
environment, hurting an animal, and hurting a human are all evaluated (by some people) by the
same criterion, perhaps suffering. Interestingly, global warming was also significantly predicted
by Purity scores, which may mean that many of our participants perceive nature as sacred.
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14
Lastly, we were surprised that in both studies, Fairness was the weakest foundation
predictor of moral disapproval and issue positions. According to Jost and colleagues (2003) one
of the central psychological dimensions that distinguish liberals and conservatives is opposition
to or relative tolerance for inequality. Therefore, it is possible that variability on the fairness
dimension is already captured well by one’s liberal-conservative identification. As a result, the
Fairness foundation did not emerge as a strong moral predictor of political opinions, once the
effects of ideological self-placement were statistically controlled.
Study limitations
These studies had several important limitations. First and foremost, our sample was
collected via the Internet and thus it is one of convenience. Undoubtedly, the types of media
which mentioned the research website (e.g. the New York Times, Edge.org, and political blogs)
tend to draw a particular type of individual. Our participants were younger, more educated, more
secular, wealthier, more interested in politics, and more liberal than the average U.S. population,
and all had access to the Internet. Nevertheless, we believe that our sample is a substantial
improvement over the college student samples often used in studies on political ideology
(Gosling, Vazire, Srivastava, & John 2004). Like our participants, college students tend to be
educated and liberal; in addition, however, they are more homogenous in age, socio-economic
status, and relationship status, less interested in or informed about politics, and have less stable
attitudes in general (Sears, 1986; Wattenberg, 2003).
Another potential problem is that our participants self-selected to take the measures we
report on here among a list of numerous alternatives. Our results thus may over-represent
individuals who are especially interested in and opinionated about political issues. We believe
that this is a preferable situation when compared to studying people who have too little interest in
politics (such as college students; Wattenberg, 2003). Our goal is to understand the relationships
between morality, partisanship, and culture-war issues; we make no claims about the average or
typical American.
Lastly, both studies are based on purely correlational data, thus we are unable to establish
the causal relationships between moral foundation scores, ideology, and issue positions. It is
almost certain that all relationships among these variables are bidirectional, but developmental
and experimental studies will be needed to quantify the strengths of these links, and whether
these strengths vary by age or context. For example, would knowing a nine year old child’s
relative level of concerns about animal suffering, unfairness, team loyalty, respect for authority,
or disgust sensitivity allow us to predict that child’s attitudes twenty years later on the culture
war issues we examined here? Would priming the foundations subliminally—or through
carefully manipulated political rhetoric—move judgments, and would the effects be limited to
the foundations we found here to be the important predictors? Might it be possible to frame
culture war issues in terms that more directly speak to a particular audience’s central moral
concerns? These types of causal questions all await future research.
Conclusion
Returning to Connie and Libby, what can we say about their (seemingly) inconsistent or
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15
unrelated political attitudes? Libby might support abortion rights but oppose gun rights merely
because she is a member of the liberal team; indeed, ideological self-placement was consistently
found to be a strong predictor of political opinions. However, our findings suggest an additional
binding thread. If Libby’s feelings about abortion are primarily a function of a moral
commitment to women’s rights (Fairness), whereas her position on gun control stems from a
hatred of violence (Harm), then simultaneously being pro-choice on abortion and anti-choice on
gun ownership is wholly understandable; the frequent occurrence of this attitudinal pattern may
be a function of the finding that both Harm and Fairness concerns are elevated in political
liberals (Graham, Haidt, & Nosek, 2009). Similarly, Connie may be more prone than Libby to
perceive sacredness in biomedical issues, and is therefore fully sincere when she talks about the
sanctity of life (Purity) as a reason to prevent women from obtaining abortions or terminally ill
patients from obtaining life-ending drugs. Yet when it comes to gun purchases, Purity concerns
don’t apply, and Connie’s position instead rests on the idea that each member of a group should
be able to defend that group from outside threats (Ingroup).
Clearly there is some room for play—or for motivated moral reasoning (Ditto, Pizarro, &
Tannenbaum, 2009)—when people and parties connect political issues to moral foundations.
Nonetheless, there are constraints as well, and some issue positions will fit together better than
others. The rich tapestry of an individual’s political attitudes cannot be fully understood simply
by looking at the surface features of culture war issues, nor by relying solely on the individual’s
ideology. Understanding the relations and coherence among culture war positions requires
teasing apart their underlying moral psychological threads, and moral foundations theory is a
promising and relatively comprehensive approach to that end.
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16
Appendix
Political Attitudes Questionnaire (Study 2)
Instructions: “The following questions address eleven controversial political issues. Individual
opinions on these topics vary widely and there are no “right” or “wrong” answers.
[After clicking a “Next” button below the instructions, participants were given the following
items, each appearing in a random order and on its own web page. The answer options had a
“radio button” that could be clicked to select that answer.]
Abortion
Which statement about abortion comes closest to your views:
- Abortion should be generally available to those who want it.
- Abortion should be available but under stricter limits than it is now.
- Abortion should be against the law except in cases of rape, incest and to save the
woman’s life
- Abortion should not be permitted at all.
- Don’t know
Defense spending
Which statement about defense spending comes closest to your views:
- The federal government should increase its defense spending.
- The federal government should maintain its current defense spending
- The federal government should decrease its defense spending.
- Don’t know.
Teaching intelligent design/creationism
Which statement about teaching creationism/intelligent design in public schools comes closest to
your views:
- Public schools should only teach the theory of evolution.
- Public schools should teach creationism/intelligent design along with evolution.
- Public schools should only teach creationism/intelligent design (instead of evolution).
- Don’t know
Illegal immigration
Which statement about illegal immigrants comes closest to your views:
- Illegal immigrants do more to strengthen the U.S. economy overall because they
provide low-cost labor and they spend money.
- Illegal immigrants do more to weaken the U.S. economy overall because they don’t all
pay taxes but can use public services.
- Don’t know
Terrorism
Which statement about combating terrorism comes closest to your views:
- In the long run, the U.S. will be safer from terrorism if it confronts the countries and
groups that promote terrorism in the Middle East.
- In the long run, the U.S. will be safer from terrorism if it stays out of other countries’
affairs in the Middle East.
- Don’t know
Torture
Which statement about forceful interrogation techniques/torture comes closest to your views:
- It is OFTEN justified to use forceful interrogation techniques/torture to get information
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17
from a suspected terrorist.
- It is SOMETIMES justified to use forceful interrogation techniques/torture to get
information from a suspected terrorist.
- The use of forceful interrogation techniques/torture is ALMOST NEVER justified.
- The use of forceful interrogation techniques/torture is NEVER justified.
- Don’t know.
Stem-cell research
Which statement about stem-cell research comes closest to your views:
- The federal government should fund research that would use newly created stem cells
obtained from human embryos.
- The federal government should NOT fund research that would use newly created stem
cells obtained from human embryos.
- Don’t know
Flag-burning
Which statement about flag burning comes closest to your views:
- I favor a constitutional amendment that would make it illegal to burn the American flag.
- I oppose a constitutional amendment that would make it illegal to burn the American
flag.
- Don’t know.
Gun control
Which statement about gun control comes closest to your views:
- It is more important to protect the right of Americans to own guns.
- It is more important to control gun ownership.
- Don’t know.
Global warming
Which statement about global warming comes closest to your views:
- The government should increase restrictions on emissions from cars and industrial
facilities such as power plants and factories in an attempt to reduce the effects of
global warming.
- The restrictions that are currently in place are sufficient to reduce the effects of global
warming.
- The government should decrease current restrictions because global warming is a theory
that has not yet been proven.
- Don’t know.
Same-sex marriage
Which statement about same-sex marriage comes closest to your views:
- Same-sex couples should be allowed to legally marry.
- Same-sex couples should be allowed to have a civil union, but not to marry.
- Same-sex couples should NOT be allowed to marry nor have civil unions.
- Don’t know
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Table I. Predicting moral disapproval ratings from demographics and moral foundations
Demographics
Moral Foundations
Religious
Politics
attendance
(cons.)
Age
Gender (m)
Harm
Same-sex relations
.012
.035 **
.164 **
.301 **
-.046 **
-.026
-.062 **
-.025
.460 **
Same-sex marriage
.003
.042 **
.127 **
.359 **
-.061 **
-.023
-.048 **
-.006
.417 **
-.010
-.081 **
-.044 *
.462 **
-.048 **
-.048 **
-.041 *
.311 **
-.002
-.021
.055 *
.333 **
Having casual sex
-.030 *
.025
.277 **
.209 **
-.014
Stem Cell Research
-.107 **
-.008
.169 **
.373 **
.022
-.042 *
Baby outside marriage
Fairness
Ingroup
Authority
Purity
.035 *
.083 **
.160 **
.224 **
Abortion
-.098 **
.105 **
.212 **
.331 **
.077 **
-.069 **
-.014
-.036
.290 **
Euthanasia
-.118 **
.044 **
.255 **
.227 **
.053 **
-.060 **
.003
-.017
.271 **
.122 **
-.207 **
.197 **
.136 **
.052 **
-.016
-.068 *
-.025
.431 **
.243 **
.002
-.044 *
.163 **
Using pornography
Flag Burning
-.025
-.073 **
-.006
Animal testing
-.051 **
-.126 **
-.060 **
-.058 *
.331 **
-.042 *
-.088 **
Cloning
-.003
-.150 **
.065 **
.037
.129 **
-.029
-.024
Death Penalty
-.006
.046 **
.129 **
-.348 **
.228 **
.011
-.022
.136 **
-.005
.069 **
.056 **
-.040
Gambling
.085 **
-.031
Note. Values shown are OLS regression beta coefficients. The top predictor for each issue is emphasized in bold.
* p < .01, ** p < .001
.099 **
.190 **
-.048
.056 *
.022
.227 **
-.135 **
.000
-.046 *
.260 **
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Table II. Predicting issue stands from demographics and the moral foundations.
Demographics
Age
Global warming
Using torture
Defense spending
Gender (m)
Moral Foundations
Religious
Politics
attendance
(cons.)
Harm
Fairness
Ingroup
Authority
Purity
-.038
.104 **
.041 *
-.004
-.067 **
.537 **
-.138 **
-.035
.040
-.047 *
-.015
-.081 **
.324 **
-.147 **
-.056 *
.118 **
.151 **
.028
.020
.020
-.019
.457 **
-.059 *
-.043
.178 **
.021
.049
.171 **
.436 **
.003
.005
Abortion
-.097 **
Teaching creationism
-.032
-.051 *
.080 **
.246 **
-.020
-.032
.001
.027
.085 **
.367 **
-.095 **
-.006
Same-sex marriage
.066 **
-.055 *
-.020
.311 **
-.016
.011
.303 **
-.044
.005
.383 **
Note. Values shown are OLS regression beta coefficients. The top predictor for each issue is emphasized in bold.
* p < .01, ** p < .001
21
The ties that bind
Table III. Logistic regression predicting odds rations of issue stands from demographics and the moral foundations.
Demographics
Age
Gun control
Moral Foundations
Religious
Politics
attendance
(cons.)
Gender (m)
Harm
Fairness
Ingroup
Authority
Purity
.99
1.33 *
.93
2.00 **
.66 **
.98
1.25 *
.82
.97
Terrorism
1.01
1.63 **
1.01
1.64 **
.71 **
.96
1.49 **
1.28 *
1.08
Flag burning
1.00
.63
.81
1.39 **
.89
2.05 **
1.50
1.71 **
Immigration
1.00
.78
.80 **
1.67 **
.81 *
1.04
1.10
1.32 *
1.30 **
.99
.99
1.44 **
2.17 **
.72 *
.90
.92
.86
2.36 **
Stem-cell research
1.23
Note. Values shown are odds ratios (ORs). ORs greater than 1 indicate a higher likelihood of taking the conservative position and vice
versa. Effect size is evaluated with respect to 1. ORs further from 1 (in either direction) indicate a larger effect; OR = 2.00 indicates that
a one-unit increase means the conservative stand is twice as likely, and OR = .50 means that it is half as likely. The top predictor for
each issue is emphasized in bold.
* p < .01, ** p < .001
22