Testing Measurement Invariance of the Moral Foundations Questionnaire Across 27 Countries

Abstract

It has become clear that there are multiple “moralities”: diverse bases that guide people’s judgments of right and wrong. The widely known Moral Foundations Theory stipulates that there are at least five such moralities, measurable via questionnaire, and tends to assume that these distinct foundations are rooted deep in humanity’s evolutionary past. Were this true, we should find that the structure of five foundations is cross-culturally generalizable. Such assumptions are best tested in a diverse range of global populations with no built-in Western bias. Here, we test the measurement invariance of the short-form Moral Foundations Questionnaire across 27 countries spanning the five largest continents. We find that it is difficult to specify Moral Foundations Questionnaire items in a quantitative five-factor model that will converge nonproblematically across a wide variety of populations.

Keywords

measurement invariance cross-cultural assessment Moral Foundations Questionnaire moral psychology moral judgment

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Bou Malham

Saucier

. (2014). Measurement invariance of social axioms in 23 countries. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 45, 1046-1060.

Central Intelligence Agency. (2012). The world factbook. Retrieved from https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2119rank.html

Davies

Sibley

Liu

(2014). Confirmatory factor analysis of the Moral Foundations Questionnaire: Independent scale validation in a New Zealand sample. Social Psychology, 45, 431-436.

Davis

D. E.

Rice

Van Tongeren

D. R.

Hook

J. N.

DeBlaere

Worthington

E. L.

Jr. Choe

(2016). The moral foundations hypothesis does not replicate well in Black samples. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 110(4), e23.

Gilligan

(1977). In a different voice: Women’s conceptions of the self and morality. Harvard Educational Review, 47, 481-517.

Graham

Haidt

Koleva

Motyl

Iyer

Wojcik

Ditto

(2013). Moral foundations theory: The pragmatic validity of moral pluralism. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 47, 55-130.

Graham

Nosek

Haidt

Iyer

Koleva

Ditto

(2011). Mapping the moral domain. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 101, 366-385.

Haidt

Graham

(2009). Planet of the Durkheimians, where community, authority, and sacredness are foundations of morality. In Jost

Kay

A. C.

Thorisdottir

(Eds.), Social and psychological bases of ideology and system justification (pp. 371-401). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Haidt

Joseph

(2007). The moral mind: How 5 sets of innate intuitions guide the development of many culture-specific virtues, and perhaps even modules. In Carruthers

Laurence

Stich

(Eds.), The innate mind: Vol. 3. Foundations and the future (3rd ed., pp. 367-391). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

10.

Henrich

Heine

Norenzayan

(2010). The weirdest people in the world. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 33, 61-83.

11.

Bentler

P. M

. (1999). Cutoff criteria for fit indexes in covariance structure analysis: Conventional criteria versus new alternatives. Structural Equation Modeling, 6, 1-55.

12.

Kohlberg

(1971). From is to ought: How to commit the naturalistic fallacy and get away with it in the study of moral development. In Mischel

(Ed.), Cognitive development and epistemology (pp. 151-284). New York, NY: Academic Press.

13.

Leung

Bond

M. H.

de Carrasquel

S. R.

Muñoz

Hernández

Murakami

. . . Singelis

T. M.

(2002). Social axioms: The search for universal dimensions of general beliefs about how the world functions. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 33, 286-302.

14.

Métayer

Pahlavan

(2014). Validation of the Moral Foundations Questionnaire in French. Revue Internationale de Psychologie Sociale, 27, 79-107.

15.

Muthén

L. K.

Muthén

B. O.

(2012). Mplus user’s guide (7th ed.). Los Angeles, CA: Muthén & Muthén.

16.

Nilsson

Erlandsson

(2015). The Moral Foundations taxonomy: Structural validity and relation to political ideology in Sweden. Personality and Individual Differences, 76, 28-32.

17.

Saucier

Kenner

Iurino

Bou Malham

Chen

Thalmayer

A. G.

. . . Altschul

. Cross-cultural differences in a global “Survey of World Views.” (2015). Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 46, 53-70.

18.

Shweder

Much

Mahapatra

Park

(1997). The big three of morality (autonomy, community, and divinity), and the “big three” explanations of suffering. In Brandit

Rozin

(Eds.), Morality and health (pp. 119-169). New York, NY: Routledge.

19.

Thalmayer

Saucier

(2014). The Questionnaire Big Six in 26 nations: Developing cross-culturally applicable Big Six, Big Five, and Big Two Inventories. European Journal of Personality, 28, 482-496. doi:10.1002/per.1969

20.

Van Leeuwen

Park

J. H.

Koenig

B. L.

Graham

. (2012). Regional variation in pathogen prevalence predicts endorsement of group-focused moral concerns. Evolution and Human Behavior, 33, 429-437.

21.

Wiggins

J. S.

(1973). Personality and prediction: Principles of personality assessment. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

22.

Yilmaz

Harma

Bahçekapili

H. G.

Cesur

(2016). Validation of the moral foundations questionnaire in Turkey and its relation to cultural schemas of individualism and collectivism. Personality and Individual Differences, 99, 149-154.

Supplementary Material

Please find the following supplemental material available below.

For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.

For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.

0.00 MB

0.15 MB