Moral foundations and criminality: comparing community members to prisoners and violent/non-violent offenders

ABSTRACT

Morality is built upon individualizing (i.e. care, fairness) and binding (i.e. loyalty, authority, and purity) moral foundations, which are the systems that help people to make moral decisions and behave accordingly. Past research has found that moral foundations are related to past unethical behaviors, but we are the first to test them among people in prison. Specifically, we investigated individual differences in moral foundations in men and women in prison (N = 382) relative to Poles with no criminal record (N = 382), who were matched to the prisoner sample by sex and age. We showed that prisoners care about moral foundations, but just with a different intensity than people from the general population. We found that prisoners had lower individualizing moral foundations and higher binding moral foundations than participants from the general population. Violent prisoners had lower levels of care and purity than non-violent prisoners. Regarding sex differences, women scored higher in individualizing moral foundations than men, both among prisoners and non-prisoners. Lastly, women in prison scored higher in binding moral foundations than men in prison. Our study adds to the discussion of individual differences in moral foundations, which might help prevent crimes and enable the resocialization process.

KEYWORDS:

• Individual differences; moral foundations; prison; crime; sex differences

Author contributions

Conceptualization: MPC; Data curation: MPC; Formal analysis: MPC, MB, PJ; Funding acquisition: MPC; Methodology: MPC, MB, PJ; Writing – original draft: MPC, MLV, PJ; Writing – review & editing: MPC, MLV, MB, PJ.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 On our OSF page (https://osf.io/vnyqt/?view_only=None) we provide a Table S1 breaking down individual crimes overall and, in each sex, and our data. Our reduction to two groups was, in part, motivated by unequal cells across the various crimes. When prisoner committed at least one violent crime, he or she was coded as violent prisoner. We followed common practices in such coding (e.g., stealing was treated as non-violent, but robbery as violent). Our database (see OSF) includes types of crimes and their coding.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by grants ‘Moral thinking and unethical behavior’ (number PN/BEK/2020/1/00058/DEC/1) from the NAWA Bekker Programme (prisoner sample) and ‘Moral Coherence: the relationship between people’s behavior and their moral views and emotions’ (number 2017/01/X/HS6/01332) from NCN Miniatura 1 (non-prisoner sample). The fourth author was partially supported by a grant from the Czech Science Foundation (23-05379S) and a grant from the National Science Center of Poland (2019/35/B/HS6/00682).