First Name:
Daniel
Last Name:
DeCarlo
Major Department:
Psychology and Political Science
Thesis Director:
Todd Hartman and Douglas Warring
Date of Thesis:
May 2013
Though morality is often dealt with as a normative matter, Moral Foundations Theory (MFT), a recent advance in psychology, attempts a descriptive account based on five distinct moral concerns, or foundations (Haidt, 2012). Basing these concerns in evolutionarily adaptive social behaviors (Haidt & Joseph, 2007), and our mechanism of moral judgment in intuition (Haidt, 2001), MFT broadens our framework of morality to include facets endorsed as moral by competing cultures and ideologies (Haidt, 2012). In testing MFT, significant correlations with ideology have been reported. Liberals scored highly on some foundations, and conservatives scored highly on others. (Graham, Haidt, & Joseph, 2009). I argue that the current measure of MFT is biased, exaggerating the ideological differences on each moral foundation. Creating a new measure, purged of problematic items, greatly reduced the reported effects. Furthermore, ideology is not a unitary concept, and important differences emerge between social and economic ideological dimensions. A perspective is emphasized in which neither morality nor ideology is wholly causal of the other.