Moral foundations vignettes: a standardized stimulus database of scenarios based on moral foundations theory

Abstract

Research on the emotional, cognitive, and social determinants of moral judgment has surged in recent years. The development of moral foundations theory (MFT) has played an important role, demonstrating the breadth of morality. Moral psychology has responded by investigating how different domains of moral judgment are shaped by a variety of psychological factors. Yet, the discipline lacks a validated set of moral violations that span the moral domain, creating a barrier to investigating influences on judgment and how their neural bases might vary across the moral domain. In this paper, we aim to fill this gap by developing and validating a large set of moral foundations vignettes (MFVs). Each vignette depicts a behavior violating a particular moral foundation and not others. The vignettes are controlled on many dimensions including syntactic structure and complexity making them suitable for neuroimaging research. We demonstrate the validity of our vignettes by examining respondents’ classifications of moral violations, conducting exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis, and demonstrating the correspondence between the extracted factors and existing measures of the moral foundations. We expect that the MFVs will be beneficial for a wide variety of behavioral and neuroimaging investigations of moral cognition.

Disgust sensitivity is primarily associated with purity-based moral judgments.

“…In all studies, moral transgressions were taken from a standardized set of vignettes based on Moral Foundations Theory (Clifford et al, 2015). This measure was chosen as it is the first set of moral judgments that is well-validated.…”

“…Based on the findings in our previous studies, 5 a conservative a priori power analysis was conducted using G*Power (Faul, Erdfelder, Lang, & Bucher, 2007) Olatunji et al, 2007). Sixty moral transgressions were taken from the same item set as in Studies 1 to 4 (Clifford et al, 2015), ten from each moral domain. All moral domains had high reliabilities (see Table 2).…”

“…This makes it difficult for researchers to test for the effects of emotions on moral judgments across domains (Clifford et al, 2015;Horberg et al, 2009). Therefore, we use moral Running head: DISGUST SENSITIVITY AND MORAL JUDGMENTS 12 judgments drawn from the Moral Foundations Vignettes (Clifford et al, 2015).…”

“…This makes it difficult for researchers to test for the effects of emotions on moral judgments across domains (Clifford et al, 2015;Horberg et al, 2009). Therefore, we use moral Running head: DISGUST SENSITIVITY AND MORAL JUDGMENTS 12 judgments drawn from the Moral Foundations Vignettes (Clifford et al, 2015). This set of vignettes provides a standardized and validated set of moral judgments that spans much of the moral domain as proposed by Moral Foundations Theory, thereby solving common problems resulting from using unstandardized scenarios.…”

Attitudes and Donation Behavior When Reading Positive and Negative Charity Appeals

“…In Study 1C, this survey included 24 questions inspired by a measure about moral intuitions proposed by Clifford, Iyengar, Cabeza, and Sinnott-Armstrong (2015) and ratings of their political preferences. On the last page of the initial survey (and on the last page of the next two questionnaires), participants were asked to rate their current mood.…”