The moral domain is broader than the empathy and justice concerns assessed by existing measures of moral competence, and it is not just a subset of the values assessed by value inventories. To fill the need for reliable and theoretically-grounded measurement of the full range of moral concerns, we developed the Moral Foundations Questionnaire (MFQ) based on a theoretical model of five universally available (but variably developed) sets of moral intuitions: Harm/care, Fairness/reciprocity, Ingroup/loyalty, Authority/respect, and Purity/sanctity. We present evidence for the internal and external validity of the scale and the model, and in doing so present new findings about morality: 1. Comparative model fitting of confirmatory factor analyses provides empirical justification for a five-factor structure of moral concerns. 2. Convergent/discriminant validity evidence suggests that moral concerns predict personality features and social group attitudes not previously considered morally relevant. 3. We establish pragmatic validity of the measure in providing new knowledge and research opportunities concerning demographic and cultural differences in moral intuitions. These analyses provide evidence for the usefulness of Moral Foundations Theory in simultaneously increasing the scope and sharpening the resolution of psychological views of morality.

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Libertarians are an increasingly prominent ideological group in U.S. politics, yet they have been largely unstudied. Across 16 measures in a large web-based sample that included 11,994 self-identified libertarians, we sought to understand the moral and psychological characteristics of self-described libertarians. Based on an intuitionist view of moral judgment, we focused on the underlying affective and cognitive dispositions that accompany this unique worldview. Compared to self-identified liberals and conservatives, libertarians showed 1) stronger endorsement of individual liberty as their foremost guiding principle, and weaker endorsement of all other moral principles; 2) a relatively cerebral as opposed to emotional cognitive style; and 3) lower interdependence and social relatedness. As predicted by intuitionist theories concerning the origins of moral reasoning, libertarian values showed convergent relationships with libertarian emotional dispositions and social preferences. Our findings add to a growing recognition of the role of personality differences in the organization of political attitudes.

Many methods for reducing implicit prejudice have been identified, but little is known about their relative effectiveness. We held a research contest to experimentally compare interventions for reducing the expression of implicit racial prejudice. Teams submitted seventeen interventions that were tested an average of 3.70 times each in four studies (total N = 17,021), with rules for revising interventions between studies. Eight of seventeen interventions were effective at reducing implicit preferences for Whites compared to Blacks, particularly ones that provided experience with counterstereotypical exemplars, used evaluative conditioning methods, and provided strategies to override biases. The other nine interventions were ineffective, particularly ones that engaged participants with others' perspectives, asked participants to consider egalitarian values, or induced a positive emotion. The most potent interventions were ones that invoked high self-involvement or linked Black people with positivity and White people with negativity. No intervention consistently reduced explicit racial preferences. Furthermore, intervention effectiveness only weakly extended to implicit preferences for Asians and Hispanics. Abstract = 160 words Keywords = attitudes, racial prejudice, implicit social cognition, malleability, Implicit Association Test September 9, 2016 update: We updated this manuscript to fix several minor reporting errors that we have learned about since the publication of the manuscript in August 2014. For a summary of these updates, please see pages 67 and 68. Authors' note:This project was supported by a gift from Project Implicit. Lai and Hawkins are consultants and Nosek is an officer of Project Implicit, Inc., a non-profit organization that includes in its mission "To develop and deliver methods for investigating and applying phenomena of implicit social cognition, including especially phenomena of implicit bias based on age, race, gender or other factors. Thoughts and feelings outside of conscious awareness shape social perception, judgment and action (Bargh, 1999;Devine, 1989;Greenwald & Banaji, 1995). Nowhere has this idea been more explored than in studies of racial prejudice in which people report egalitarian racial attitudes, but also implicitly prefer Whites compared to Blacks (Devine, 1989;Dovidio, Kawakami, Johnson, Johnson, & Howard, 1997;Fazio, Jackson, Dunton, & Williams, 1995;. These studies have been influential because implicit racial preferences predict behaviors such as negative interracial contact (McConnell & Leibold, 2001), biases in medical decision-making (Green et al., 2007), and hiring discrimination (Rooth, 2010).From the hundreds of studies conducted, we can conclude that implicit preferences (1) are related to, but distinct from, explicit preferences (Greenwald & Banaji, 1995;, (2) are constructed through different mechanisms than explicit preferences (De Houwer, Teige-Mocigemba, Spruyt, & Moors, 2009;Ranganath & Nosek, 2008;Ratliff & Nosek, 2011;Rydell & McConnell, 2006), ...

A long-standing puzzle for moral philosophers and psychologists alike is the concept of psychopathy, a personality disorder marked by tendencies to defy moral norms despite cognitive knowledge about right and wrong. Previously, discussions of the moral deficits of psychopathy have focused on willingness to harm and cheat others as well as reasoning about rule-based transgressions. Yet recent research in moral psychology has begun to more clearly define the domains of morality, encompassing issues of harm, fairness, loyalty, authority, and spiritual purity. Clinical descriptions and theories of psychopathy suggest that deficits may exist primarily in the areas of harm and fairness, although quantitative evidence is scarce. Within a broad sample of participants, we found that scores on a measure of psychopathy predicted sharply lower scores on the harm and fairness subscales of a measure of moral concern, but showed no relationship with authority, and very small relationships with ingroup and purity. On a measure of willingness to violate moral standards for money, psychopathy scores predicted greater willingness to violate moral concerns of any type. Results are further explored via potential mediators and analyses of the two factors of psychopathy.

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Throughout history, principles such as obedience, loyalty, and purity have been instrumental in binding people together and helping them thrive as groups, tribes, and nations. However, these same principles have also led to in-group favoritism, war, and even genocide. Does adhering to the binding moral foundations that underlie such principles unavoidably lead to the derogation of out-group members? We demonstrated that for people with a strong moral identity, the answer is "no," because they are more likely than those with a weak moral identity to extend moral concern to people belonging to a perceived out-group. Across three studies, strongly endorsing the binding moral foundations indeed predicted support for the torture of out-group members (Studies 1a and 1b) and withholding of necessary help from out-group members (Study 2), but this relationship was attenuated among participants who also had a strong moral identity.