Moral foundations
What your morality is built on — and why you clash with people who build on something else.
Haidt's theory holds that human morality rests on six foundations: care, fairness, loyalty, authority, purity and liberty. Almost nobody weighs them equally, and that is where most political arguments are born. It is the best psychological predictor of ideology there is.
Moral foundations · 6
Care
Sensitivity to the suffering of others: morality built on not doing harm.
Fairness
Reciprocity, rights and fair treatment as a moral basis.
Loyalty
Faithfulness to your own group: family, team, country.
Authority
Respect for hierarchy, tradition and legitimate order.
Purity
Notions of the sacred, of decency and of moral contamination.
Liberty
A gut rejection of domination and of being told how to live.
Where this comes from
This test draws on published, peer-reviewed instruments. It is not a certified adaptation: the items are rewritten in everyday language.
- [1]Graham, Haidt & Nosek (2009). JPSP, 96(5), 1029–1046
The study showing that progressives and conservatives draw on different foundations.
- [2]Graham et al. (2011). Mapping the moral domain. JPSP, 101(2), 366–385
Validation of the questionnaire and the full map of the moral domain.
- [3]Iyer et al. (2012). Libertarian morality. PLoS ONE, 7(8), e42366
Adds the liberty foundation, missing from the original version.