The Relationship between Political Views and Moral Judgments

Indianapolis, IN

This study was designed to study the relationship between political views and moral judgments. Previous research shows that people use five foundations as part of their moral systems, known as the moral foundations theory (Haidt & Graham, 2007). Other research shows that liberals construct their moral systems upon two of the five foundations: harm/care and fairness, while conservatives use all five foundations: harm/care, fairness, in-group, authority, and purity (Graham, Haidt, & Nosek, 2009).Rather than treating conservatism as a single dimension, I used the idea of dividing conservatism into Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) and Social Dominance Orientation (SDO), which was initially introduced in previous research by Bob Altemeyer (1998; also see Duckitt, 2001). This study took the ideas that Haidt and Altemeyer initiated and expands on it. I added a sixth foundation – competitive/hierarchy - to account for the SDOs not fitting any of the five foundations that Haidt and colleagues initially mentioned. In this study, I sent the participants a link to an online survey. The first part of the survey has items in which the participant is asked to respond how right or wrong the item is to the participant. The second part of the survey is meant to determine what political views the participant has. I expect that high-RWAs will resemble conservatives in Graham et al. (2009)\, while high-SDOs will score low on all foundations except the new competitive/hierarchy foundation that I developed.