Moral Foundations
The intuitions that shape your sense of right and wrong
Free, no account needed.
Moral Foundations Theory proposes that human morality is built on several intuitive foundations, each a sensitivity that helped our ancestors live together: caring for the vulnerable, treating people as equals, rewarding effort, sticking together, respecting roles, keeping things sacred and resisting domination. People and cultures weigh them differently.
You will rate how much various considerations matter to you when you judge right and wrong, and how far you agree with some moral statements. Answer with your first honest reaction. There are no right answers, and everyone uses every foundation to some degree.
What it measures
Care
Sensitivity to suffering, and the wish to protect the vulnerable from harm.
Low: Harm and suffering weigh less in your judgements than other concerns, and you may value toughness.
High: Cruelty and suffering move you strongly; protecting the vulnerable is central to your morality.
Equality
Concern that people are treated as equals, with equal rights, an equal voice and a fair share.
Low: Differences in wealth and status do not trouble you much, as long as they arise fairly.
High: Inequality, privilege and exclusion strike you as moral problems that call for correction.
Proportionality
Concern that people get what they deserve: rewards in line with effort, penalties in line with wrongdoing.
Low: Whether rewards match effort matters less to you than need, equality or other concerns.
High: Free-riding and undeserved rewards bother you; people should reap what they sow.
Loyalty
Commitment to your groups, whether family, team, community or nation: solidarity, belonging and sacrifice.
Low: Your moral concern goes to individuals rather than to groups, and you feel free to criticise your own.
High: Standing by your own is a core virtue for you, and betrayal is among the worst wrongs.
Authority
Respect for legitimate roles, traditions and leadership, and for the order they provide.
Low: Respect has to be earned; you are wary of hierarchy and comfortable questioning those in charge.
High: You value tradition, legitimate leadership and the duties of every role, and disrespect troubles you.
Purity
The sense that some things are sacred or noble, and that body, mind or community can be degraded.
Low: If no one is harmed, you see little moral weight in whether something is disgusting or unconventional.
High: You sense that some things are sacred, and that some acts degrade people even when no one is harmed.
Liberty
Resistance to domination and coercion by governments, bosses, groups or bullies.
Low: You accept that communities and laws may limit personal freedom for the common good.
High: Being controlled or coerced strikes you as a deep wrong; people should be free to run their own lives.
Possible results
About this test
Moral Foundations Theory was developed in the 2000s by the social psychologists Jonathan Haidt, Craig Joseph, Jesse Graham and colleagues. Drawing on anthropology and evolutionary psychology, they argued that moral judgement rests largely on fast intuitions that cluster into a handful of foundations. The original Moral Foundations Questionnaire (2011) measured five: care, fairness, loyalty, authority and purity. Liberty was proposed as a sixth in 2012, partly to make sense of libertarians. In 2023 the MFQ-2, developed by Mohammad Atari and colleagues and tested in 25 populations, split fairness into equality (equal treatment and shares) and proportionality (rewards in line with contribution), because the old items mixed the two.
This test measures all seven with original statements, some about what matters to you and some about specific moral views, about a third of them reverse-keyed. Your dominant foundation is simply the one you score highest on. The reference profiles are rough approximations of published patterns, mostly from Western and especially American samples, placed by hand on this test's scale; they are not norms.
The theory is influential and contested. Critics argue that its questionnaires do not show the same structure in every culture, that perceived harm may underlie many judgements the theory files under other foundations, and that rival models, such as Morality-as-Cooperation, divide morality differently. Links between foundations and politics are average tendencies, not destinies: people of every political view endorse every foundation, profiles vary widely within each group, and no profile is morally superior. Your scores are relative to the answer range, not to other people. Use them to understand yourself and others, not to label anyone.
References
- Haidt, J. & Joseph, C. (2004). Intuitive ethics: How innately prepared intuitions generate culturally variable virtues. Daedalus, 133(4), 55-66.
- Graham, J., Haidt, J. & Nosek, B. A. (2009). Liberals and conservatives rely on different sets of moral foundations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 96(5), 1029-1046.
- Graham, J., Nosek, B. A., Haidt, J., Iyer, R., Koleva, S. & Ditto, P. H. (2011). Mapping the moral domain. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 101(2), 366-385.
- Iyer, R., Koleva, S., Graham, J., Ditto, P. & Haidt, J. (2012). Understanding libertarian morality. PLoS ONE, 7(8), e42366.
- Haidt, J. (2012). The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.
- Atari, M., Haidt, J., Graham, J., Koleva, S., Stevens, S. T. & Dehghani, M. (2023). Morality beyond the WEIRD: How the nomological network of morality varies across cultures. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 125(5), 1157-1188.
- Curry, O. S., Jones Chesters, M. & Van Lissa, C. J. (2019). Mapping morality with a compass: Testing the theory of "morality-as-cooperation" with a new questionnaire. Journal of Research in Personality, 78, 106-124.
- Schein, C. & Gray, K. (2018). The theory of dyadic morality: Reinventing moral judgment by redefining harm. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 22(1), 32-70.
- Moral Foundations website
For self-reflection and curiosity, not diagnosis. Scores describe how you answered, relative to the possible range; they are not compared with population norms.
Moral Foundations
About 5 minutes · 42 questions
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