The Dimensionality of the Moral Foundations: Contributions from the Moral Foundations Sacredness Scale in Four Societies

Abstract

Moral Foundations Theory proposes that five innate modules offer an intuitive response that drives our moral judgments. Various instruments were developed to measure the five moral foundations, including the MFV and the MFQ-30 which focus on deliberative moral reasoning. This approach is limited because intuitions are more basic and affect-laden. The Moral Foundations Sacredness Scale (MFSS) was designed to elicit responses that more closely resemble these phenomena. However, studies have not converged on a factorial structure for the MFSS, and measurement invariance has never been assessed. Our study sought to evaluate these properties across four adult samples, via Exploratory Structural Equation Modeling, and the associations between the MFSS’s scales and relevant constructs. We found that a two-factor solution, reflecting the individualizing and binding foundations, had a reasonable fit, and had invariance (configural, metric, and scalar) across gender, age groups, and (configural) four international samples. The scales were reliable, had construct validity with the MFQ-30, and criterion-related validity with the binding moderately predicting belief in God/spirit and religious behaviors. The convergence we found regarding the MFSS’s factorial structure across groups has important implications for the dimensionality of these constructs, and – ultimately – for the development of Moral Foundations Theory.

Ethics statement

Our study was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. We report how we determined our sample size, all data exclusions, all manipulations, and all measures in the study.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any potential conflict of interest.

Data availabilitystatement

The datasets generated and/or analyzed in this study are available on the OSF Platform: Portuguese sample – https://osf.io/fus8e/; Yourmorals samples – https://osf.io/6qs5g/.

CRediT statement

Pedro J. C. Costa: Conceptualization, Methodology, Data curation, Software, Formal Analysis, Visualization, Writing - Original draft preparation.

Paulo A. S. Moreira: Writing - Review & Editing, Project administration, Supervision.