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GRAHAM, HAIDT, AND NOSEK1030pessimistic view of human nature, believing that people are inherently selfish and imperfectible. They therefore hold what Sowellcalled a “constrained vision” in which people need the constraintsof authority, institutions, and traditions to live civilly with eachother.In terms of their personalities, liberals and conservatives have longbeen said to differ in ways that correspond to their conflicting visions.Liberals on average are more open to experience, more inclined toseek out change and novelty both personally and politically (McCrae,1996). Conservatives, in contrast, have a stronger preference forthings that are familiar, stable, and predictable (Jost, Nosek, & Gosling, 2008; McCrae, 1996). Conservatives—at least, the subset proneto authoritarianism—also show a stronger emotional sensitivity tothreats to the social order, which motivates them to limit liberties indefense of that order (Altemeyer, 1996; McCann, 2008; Stenner,2005). Jost, Glaser, Sulloway, and Kruglanski (2003) concluded froma meta-analysis of this literature that the two core aspects of conservative ideology are resistance to change and acceptance of inequality.How can these various but complementary depictions of ideologicaland personality differences be translated into specific predictionsabout moral differences? First, we must examine and revise thedefinition of the moral domain.Expanding the Moral DomainThe consensus view in moral psychology has been that moralityis first and foremost about protecting individuals. The most citeddefinition comes from Turiel (1983, p. 3), who defined the moraldomain as “prescriptive judgments of justice, rights, and welfarepertaining to how people ought to relate to each other.” Turiel(2006) explicitly grounded this definition in the tradition of liberalpolitical theory from Kant through John Stuart Mill to John Rawls.Nearly all research in moral psychology, whether carried out usinginterviews, fMRI, or dilemmas about stolen medicine and runawaytrolleys, has been limited to issues of justice, rights, and welfare.When morality is equated with the protection of individuals, thecentral concerns of conservatives—and of people in many nonWestern cultures—fall outside the moral domain. Research in India,Brazil, and the United States, for example, has found that people whoare less Westernized treat many issues related to food, sex, clothing,prayer, and gender roles as moral issues (Shweder, Mahapatra, &Miller, 1987), even when they involve no harm to any person (Haidt,Koller, & Dias, 1993). Shweder, Much, Mahapatra, and Park (1997)proposed that Western elites are unusual in limiting the moral domainto what they called the “ethic of autonomy.” They proposed thatmorality in most cultures also involves an “ethic of community”(including moral goods such as obedience, duty, interdependence, andthe cohesiveness of groups and institutions) and an “ethic of divinity”(including moral goods such as purity, sanctity, and the suppression ofhumanity’s baser, more carnal instincts).Haidt (2008) recently suggested an alternative approach to definingmorality that does not exclude conservative and non-Western concerns. Rather than specifying the content of a truly moral judgment hespecified the functions of moral systems: “Moral systems are interlocking sets of values, practices, institutions, and evolved psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate selfishnessand make social life possible” (p. 70). Haidt described two commonkinds of moral systems—two ways of suppressing selfishness—thatcorrespond roughly to Sowell’s (2002) two visions. Some cultures tryto suppress selfishness by protecting individuals directly (often usingthe legal system) and by teaching individuals to respect the rights ofother individuals. This individualizing approach focuses on individuals as the locus of moral value. Other cultures try to suppress selfishness by strengthening groups and institutions and by binding individuals into roles and duties in order to constrain their imperfect natures.This binding approach focuses on the group as the locus of moralvalue.The individualizing– binding distinction does not necessarily correspond to a left-wing versus right-wing distinction for all groups andin all societies. The political left has sometimes been associated withsocialism and communism, positions that privilege the welfare of thegroup over the rights of the individual and that have at times severelylimited individual liberty. Conversely, the political right includeslibertarians and “laissez-faire” conservatives who prize individualliberty as essential to the functioning of the free market (Boaz, 1997).We therefore do not think of political ideology— or morality—as astrictly one-dimensional spectrum. In fact, we consider it a strength ofmoral foundations theory that it allows people and ideologies to becharacterized along five dimensions. Nonetheless, we expect that theindividualizing– binding distinction can account for substantial variation in the moral concerns of the political left and right, especially inthe United States, and that it illuminates disagreements underlyingmany “culture war” issues.Moral Foundations TheorySeveral theorists have attempted to reduce the panoply of humanvalues to a manageable set of constructs or dimensions. The twomost prominent values researchers (Rokeach, 1973; Schwartz,1992) measured a wide variety of possible values and aggregatedthem through factor analysis to define a smaller set of core values.Schwartz (1992) and Rokeach (1973) both justified their lists bypointing to the fundamental social and biological needs of humanbeings.Moral foundations theory (Haidt & Graham, 2007; Haidt & Joseph,2004) also tries to reduce the panoply of values, but with a differentstrategy: We began not by measuring moral values and factor analyzing them but by searching for the best links between anthropological and evolutionary accounts of morality. Our idea was that moralintuitions derive from innate psychological mechanisms that coevolved with cultural institutions and practices (Richerson & Boyd,2005). These innate but modifiable mechanisms (Marcus, 2004) provide parents and other socializing agents the moral “foundations” tobuild on as they teach children their local virtues, vices, and moralpractices. (We prefer the term virtues to values because of its narrowerfocus on morality and because it more strongly suggests culturallearning and construction.)To find the best candidate foundations, Haidt and Joseph (2004)surveyed lists of virtues from many cultures and eras, along withtaxonomies of morality from anthropology (Fiske, 1992; Shweder etal., 1997), psychology (Schwartz & Bilsky, 1990), and evolutionarytheories about human and primate sociality (Brown, 1991; de Waal,1996). They looked for matches— cases of virtues or other moralconcerns found widely (though not necessarily universally) acrosscultures for which there were plausible and published evolutionaryexplanations of related psychological mechanisms. Two clearmatches were found that corresponded to Turiel’s (1983) moral domain and Shweder et al.’s (1997) ethics of autonomy. The widespread

THE MORAL FOUNDATIONS OF POLITICShuman obsession with fairness, reciprocity, and justice fits well withevolutionary writings about reciprocal altruism (Trivers, 1971). Andthe widespread human concern about caring, nurturing, and protectingvulnerable individuals from harm fits well with writings about theevolution of empathy (de Waal, 2008) and the attachment system(Bowlby, 1969). These two matches were labeled the Fairness/reciprocity foundation and the Harm/care foundation, respectively. Itis noteworthy that these two foundations correspond to the “ethic ofjustice” studied by Kohlberg (1969) and the “ethic of care” thatGilligan (1982) said was an independent contributor to moral judgment. We refer to these two foundations as the individualizing foundations because they are (we suggest) the source of the intuitions thatmake the liberal philosophical tradition, with its emphasis on therights and welfare of individuals, so learnable and so compelling to somany people.Haidt and Joseph (2004) found, however, that most cultures did notlimit their virtues to those that protect individuals. They identifiedthree additional clusters of virtues that corresponded closely to Shweder et al.’s (1997) description of the moral domains that lie beyondthe ethics of autonomy. Virtues of loyalty, patriotism, and selfsacrifice for the group, combined with an extreme vigilance fortraitors, matched recent work on the evolution of “coalitional psychology” (Kurzban, Tooby, & Cosmides, 2001). Virtues of subordinates (e.g., obedience and respect for authority) paired with virtues ofauthorities (such as leadership and protection) matched writings onthe evolution of hierarchy in primates (de Waal, 1982) and the waysthat human hierarchy became more dependent on the consent ofsubordinates (Boehm, 1999). These two clusters comprise most ofShweder et al.’s “ethic of community.” And lastly, virtues of purityand sanctity that play such a large role in religious laws matchedwritings on the evolution of disgust and contamination sensitivity(Rozin, Haidt, & McCauley, 2000). Practices related to purity andpollution must be understood as serving more than hygienic functions.Such practices also serve social functions, including marking off thegroup’s cultural boundaries (Soler, 1973/1979) and suppressing theselfishness often associated with humanity’s carnal nature (e.g., lust,hunger, material greed) by cultivating a more spiritual mindset (seeShweder et al.’s, 1997, description of the “ethic of divinity”). We referto these three foundations (Ingroup/loyalty, Authority/respect, andPurity/sanctity) as the binding foundations, because they are (wesuggest) the source of the intuitions that make many conservative andreligious moralities, with their emphasis on group-binding loyalty,duty, and self-control, so learnable and so compelling to so manypeople.If the foundations are innate, then why do people and culturesvary? Why are there liberals and conservatives? We take ourunderstanding of innateness from Marcus (2004), who stated thatinnate “does not mean unmalleable; it means organized in advanceof experience.” He uses the metaphor that genes create the firstdraft of the brain, and experience later edits it. We apply Marcus’smetaphor to moral development by assuming that human beingshave the five foundations as part of their evolved first draft, butthat, as for nearly all traits, there is heritable variation (Bouchard,2004; Turkheimer, 2000). Many personality traits related to thefoundations have already been shown to be moderately heritable,including harm avoidance (Keller, Coventry, Heath, & Martin,2005) and right-wing authoritarianism (McCourt, Bouchard,Lykken, Tellegen, & Keyes, 1999). But foundations are not valuesor virtues. They are the psychological systems that give children1031feelings and intuitions that make local stories, practices, and moralarguments more or less appealing during the editing process.Returning to our definition of moral systems as “interlockingsets of values, practices, institutions, and evolved psychologicalmechanisms” that function to suppress selfishness, it should nowbe clear that the foundations are the main “evolved psychologicalmechanisms” that are part of the “first draft” of the moral mind.Elsewhere we describe in more detail the role of narrative, socialconstruction, and personal construction in the creation of adultmoral and ideological identities (Haidt, Graham, & Joseph, inpress; Haidt & Joseph, 2007).Overview of StudiesIn four studies we examined the moralities of liberals andconservatives using four different methods that varied in the degree to which they relied on consciously accessible beliefs versusmore intuitive responses. In Study 1, a large international sampleof respondents rated the moral relevance of foundation-specificconcerns. In Study 2, we examined liberals’ and conservatives’moral judgments as a function of both explicit and implicit political identity. In Study 3, we elicited stronger visceral responses bypresenting participants with moral trade-offs by asking them howmuch money they would require to perform foundation-violatingbehaviors. In Study 4, we analyzed moral texts—religious sermonsdelivered in liberal and conservative churches—to see if speakersin the different moral communities spontaneously usedfoundation-related words in different ways. In all four studies wefound that liberals showed evidence of a morality based primarilyon the individualizing foundations (Harm/care and Fairness/reciprocity), whereas conservatives showed a more even distribution of values, virtues, and concerns, including the two individualizing foundations and the three binding foundations (Ingroup/loyalty, Authority/respect, and Purity/sanctity).Study 1: Moral RelevanceFor our first test of the moral foundations hypothesis we used themost direct method possible: We asked participants to rate howrelevant various concerns were to them when making moral judgments. Such a decontextualized method can be appropriate for gauging moral values, as values are said to be abstract and generalizedacross contexts (Feldman, 2003; Schwartz, 1992). But given the limitsof introspection (Nisbett & Wilson, 1977) and the intuitive quality ofmany moral judgments (Haidt, 2001), such a method does not necessarily measure how people actually make moral judgments. Assuch, reports of moral relevance are best understood as self-theoriesabout moral judgment, and they are likely to be concordant withexplicit reasoning during moral arguments. We predicted that liberalswould rate concerns related to the individualizing foundations asbeing more relevant than would conservatives, whereas that conservatives would endorse concerns related to the binding foundations asbeing more relevant than would liberals.MethodParticipantsParticipants were 1,613 adults (47% female, 53% male; median age29) who had registered at the Project Implicit website (https://

GRAHAM, HAIDT, AND NOSEK1032implicit.harvard.edu/) and were randomly assigned to this study. During registration, political self-identification was reported on a 7-pointscale anchored by strongly liberal and strongly conservative, withmoderate at the midpoint. Overall, 902 participants rated their political identity as liberal, 366 as moderate, and 264 as conservative.Eighty-one participants did not answer the question. Gender, age,household income, and education level were also assessed at registration.MaterialsParticipants first read “When you decide whether something isright or wrong, to what extent are the following considerationsrelevant to your thinking?” They then rated 15 moral relevanceitems (see Appendix A) on 6-point scales anchored by the labelsnever relevant and always relevant. The items were written to beface-valid measures of concerns related to the five foundations,with the proviso that no item could have an obvious relationship topartisan politics. For example, a Fairness item stated “Whether ornot someone was denied his or her rights.” By avoiding mentionof specific “culture war” topics such as gun rights or gay rights,we minimized the extent to which participants would recognizethe items as relevant to political ideology and therefore draw onknowledge of what liberals and conservatives believe to guidetheir own ratings. Cronbach’s alphas for the three-item measures of each foundation were .62 (Harm), .67 (Fairness), .59(Ingroup), .39 (Authority), and .70 (Purity). (For information onthe factor structure of the moral foundations, see the GeneralDiscussion below and refer to the supplement available atwww.moralfoundations.org).A 16th item stated “Whether or not someone believed in astrology.” This item served as a check for whether participants paidattention, understood the scale, and responded meaningfully. Weexpected that high ratings of relevance on this item reflected carelessor otherwise uninterpretable performance on the rest of the scale.Sixty-five participants (4.0%) were excluded because they usedthe upper half of the relevance scale in response to this item.1ProcedureThe study pool at Project Implicit randomly assigns participants toone of dozens of studies each time they return to the site (see Nosek,2005, for more information about the Virtual Laboratory). Afterrandom assignment to this study, participants completed the relevanceitems in an order randomized for each participant. They also completed an Implicit Association Test (IAT) that is not relevant for thisreport and is not discussed further. The order of implicit and explicittasks was randomized and had no effect on the results.ments than did liberals. (These patterns were consistent acrossnearly all individual items for this and the other studies.)We tested whether the effects of political identity persisted afterpartialing out variation in moral relevance ratings for other demographic variables. We created a model representing the five foundations as latent factors measured by three manifest variables each,simultaneously predicted by political identity and four covariates:age, gender, education level, and income. This model is shown inFigure 2; for clarity, we show the standardized regression estimates for politics only. Including the covariates, political identitystill predicted all five foundations in the predicted direction, allps .001. Political identity was the key explanatory variable: Itwas the only consistent significant predictor (average .25;range .16 to .34) for all five foundations.2To test whether this moral foundations pattern was unique to theUnited States, we created a multigroup version of the model shown inFigure 2. We had enough participants from the United States (n 695) and the United Kingdom (n 477) to create separate groups,and we put participants from other nations (n 417) into a thirdgroup (the countries most represented in this third group were Argentina, n 61, and Canada, n 44). We first constrained the individualitem loadings to be the same across the three groups, to test whetherpeople in different nations interpreted the items or used the scaledifferently. This model was not significantly different from the unconstrained model, 2(20) 42.27, εa .01, ns, suggesting thatthe factor loadings were invariant across our three nation groups. Wethen added equality constraints across nation groups to the regressionestimates from political identity predicting each of the five foundations, to see if politics had differential effects across nations. Thismodel was also not different from the fully unconstrained model, 2(30) 47.79, εa .02, ns, indicating that the effects of politicson foundation relevance scores were not different across nations. Thissuggests that the relations between political identity and moral foundations are consistent across our U.S., U.K., and “other nations”groups. In all three groups the individualizing foundations were endorsed more strongly by liberals than conservatives, and the bindingfoundations were endorsed more strongly by conservatives than liberals. Further, in all three nation groups liberals were more likely thanconservatives to consider individualizing concerns more morally relevant than binding concerns.Because the latent variable model does not provide insight into therank ordering of the different sets of foundations, we compared themusing a repeated-measures general linear model including politics asa covariate. For the sample as a whole, the aggregated moral relevance ratings for individualizing foundations were higher than theaggregated ratings for the binding foundations, F(1, 1207) 1,895.09, p .001, 2p .61, and this effect was moderated bypolitics, F(1, 1207) 224.34, p .001, 2p .16, such that the moreResults1Figure 1 shows foundation scores (the average of the threerelevance items for each foundation) as a function of self-ratedpolitical identity. As Figure 1 shows, the negative slopes for Harmand Fairness (the individualizing foundations) means that conservatives rated these issues as less relevant to their moral judgmentsthan did liberals. Conversely, the positive slopes for Ingroup,Authority, and Purity (the binding foundations) means that conservatives rated these issues as more relevant to their moral judg-Although this cutoff criterion was set a priori, we also tested to see ifthese participants differed systematically from other participants. These 65participants had significantly higher individual means and lower SDs on allfive subscales, suggesting they were more likely to have been givingconsistently high ratings, perhaps due to carelessness. They did not differfrom the rest of the sample in terms of gender, age, or political identity. Theremoval of their data did not significantly change the results.2Average s from the model shown in Figure 2 were .05 for age, .09for gender, .08 for income, and .06 for education.

THE MORAL FOUNDATIONS OF POLITICS1033Relevance to Moral decisions (0 never, 5 ongly Liberal ModeratelyLiberalSlightly telyStronglyConservative ConservativeSelf-reported political identityFigure 1.Relevance of moral foundations across political identity, Study 1.liberal participants showed a greater difference between the individualizing and binding moral foundations.DiscussionStudy 1 provides initial empirical support for the moral foundationshypothesis. We sampled broadly across the universe of potentialmoral concerns. Had we limited the sampling to issues related toHarm/care and Fairness/reciprocity (Turiel, 1983), liberals wouldhave appeared to have more (or more intense) moral concerns thanconservatives (cf. Emler, Renwick, & Malone, 1983). By askingabout issues related to binding groups together—namely, Ingroup/loyalty, Authority/respect, and Purity/sanctity—we found a morecomplex pattern. The moral thinking of liberals and conservativesmay not be a matter of more versus less but of different opinionsabout what considerations are relevant to moral judgment. Further,the observed differences were primarily a function of politicalidentity and did not vary substantially or consistently by gender,age, household income, or education level, suggesting that theseeffects could be a general description of moral concerns betweenthe political left and right.Importantly, the differences between liberals and conservativeswere neither binary nor absolute. Participants across the politicalspectrum agreed that individualizing concerns are very relevant tomoral judgment. Even on the binding foundations, liberals did not(on average) indicate that these were never relevant to moraljudgment. As is the case with politics in general, the most dramaticevidence for our hypotheses came from partisans at the extremes.The moral relevance ratings were self-assessments of what factorsmatter to a person when making moral judgments; they were notactual moral judgments. We expand the investigation to moral judgments in Study 2.Study 2: Moral JudgmentsIn Study 2, we retained the abstract moral relevance assessmentsfrom Study 1 and added more contextualized and concrete items thatcould more strongly trigger the sorts of moral intuitions that are saidto play an important role in moral judgment (Haidt, 2001). Wegenerated four targets of judgment for each foundation: one normativeideal (e.g., “It can never be right to kill a human being” for Harm), onestatement about government policy (e.g., “The government should

GRAHAM, HAIDT, AND NOSEK1034Figure 2. Latent variable model testing multiple predictors of moral foundation relevance assessments, Study1. Numbers to the left of foundations indicate standardized regression estimates of the effects of politicalidentity; positive numbers indicate higher for conservatives, negative numbers indicate higher for liberals.Parameters estimated 90, 2(140) 2,016.85, εa .093. The abbreviations at the right stand for the itemsin the scale given in Appendix A. VIO violence; SUF suffering; HAR harm; DIF differently; UNF unfair; RIT rights; FRN friend; LOY loyalty; BET betray; DUT duties; RES respect; RAN rank; DIS disgust; UNN unnatural; PUR purity.strive to improve the well-being of people in our nation, even if itsometimes happens at the expense of people in other nations” forIngroup), one hypothetical scenario (e.g., “If I were a soldier anddisagreed with my commanding officer’s orders, I would obey anyway because that is my duty” for Authority), and one positive virtue(e.g., “Chastity is still an important virtue for teenagers today, even ifmany don’t think

variety of social and emotional forces (Marcus, 2002; Westen, . should be left as free as possible to pursue their own courses of personal development. Conservatism, in contrast, is best under- . Journal of Personali