Moral foundations theory
[1][2][3][4] It was first proposed by the psychologists Jonathan Haidt, Craig Joseph, and Jesse Graham, building on the work of cultural anthropologist Richard Shweder.
[5] More recently, Mohammad Atari, Jesse Graham, and Jonathan Haidt have revised some aspects of the theory and developed new measurement tools.
[7][14] Haidt writes that he found Kohlberg's theories unsatisfying from the time he first encountered them in graduate school because they "seemed too cerebral" and lacked a focus on issues of emotion.
[5][15] Shweder's approach inspired Haidt to begin researching moral differences across cultures, including fieldwork in Brazil and Philadelphia.
[17] As Haidt and his collaborators worked within the social intuitionist approach, they began to devote attention to the sources of the intuitions that they believed underlay moral judgments.
[19] From their review of these earlier lines of research, they suggested that all individuals possess four "intuitive ethics", stemming from the process of human evolution as responses to adaptive challenges.
[7] In 2020, Mohammad Atari and Jesse Graham worked on potential moral foundation which is particularly important in Middle Eastern cultures, namely honor or "Qeirat" (a Persian term, originally coming from Arabic).
While this term lacks a direct translation in English, it closely aligns with the concept of 'honor' and encompasses the safeguarding and defense of female relatives, romantic partners, extended family members, and the nation.
This research identified a strong correlation between Qeirat and Loyalty, Authority, and Purity, as well as adherence to Islamic religious beliefs, and behaviors associated with maintaining romantic relationships.
These authors argued that Qeirat values operate in a way to maintain intensive kinship structures which can in turn function to keep resources in the group.
[25][26][27] However, other studies suggest that the structure of the MFQ is inconsistent across demographic groups (e.g., comparing religious and non-religious[28][29] and Black and White respondents[30]) and across cultures.
Researchers postulate that the moral foundations arose as solutions to problems common in the ancestral hunter-gatherer environment, in particular intertribal and intra-tribal conflict.
[50] Haidt's initial field work in Brazil and Philadelphia in 1989,[16] and Odisha, India in 1993, showed that moralizing indeed varies among cultures, but less than by social class (e.g. education) and age.
MFT can be of significant assistance to researchers in their quest to understand worldwide psychological diversity and to those aiming to foster democracy globally, by focusing on at least four key areas.
A recent large-scale (u = 336,691) analysis of sex differences based on the five moral foundations suggested that women consistently score higher on care, fairness, and purity across 67 cultures.
Researchers in natural language processing have relied on MFT in numerous studies in order to capture morality in textual data.
Critiques of the theory have included claims of biological implausibility[60] and redundancy among the moral foundations, which have been argued to be reducible to concern about harm[61][62][63] or to threat-reducing versus empathizing motivations.
[71] The Purity foundation in particular has been the subject of criticism due to the lack of substantial evidence supporting the alleged link between the emotion of disgust and supposed Purity-related transgressions.
