Measure the Five Foundations of your Morality

YourMorals.org is a website designed to easily and efficiently turn us into the guinea pigs of five social scientists. The results of the various personality tests are presented in bar-graph form: one bar for your results and one bar for the results of everyone else. Additionally, on more than a few results pages, the results of Democrats and Republicans are represented by separate bars.

The researchers' central inventory is the "Moral Foundations Questionnaire":

The scale is a measure of your reliance on and endorsement of five psychological foundations of morality that seem to be found across cultures. Each of the two parts of the scale contained four questions related to each foundation: 1) harm/care, 2) fairness/reciprocity (including issues of rights), 3) ingroup/loyalty, 4) authority/respect, and 5) purity/sanctity.

Democrats hold the "harm" and "fairness" foundations more dear than the remaining foundations. Republicans place equal value on all five foundations. My results (in green) are closest to those of Democrats (in blue):

The researchers' article on their 5-foundation theory of morality begins with an interesting scenario:

Suppose your next-door neighbor puts up a large sign in her front yard that says "Cable television will destroy society." You ask her to explain the sign, and she replies, "Cables are an affront to the god Thoth. They radiate theta waves, which make people sterile." You ask her to explain how a low voltage, electrically-shielded coaxial cable can make anyone sterile, but she changes the subject. The DSM-IV defines a delusion as "a false belief based on incorrect inference about external reality that is firmly sustained despite what almost everyone else believes and despite what constitutes incontrovertible and obvious proof or evidence to the contrary" (APA, DSM-IV, 1994, p.765). Your neighbor is clearly delusional and possibly schizophrenic. She is responding to forces, threats, and agents that simply do not exist.

But now suppose another neighbor puts up a large sign in his front yard that says "Gay marriage will destroy society." You ask him to explain the sign, and he replies, "Homosexuality is an abomination to God. Gay marriage will undermine marriage, the institution upon which our society rests." You ask him to explain how allowing two people to marry who are in love and of the same sex will harm other marriages, but he changes the subject. Because your neighbor is not alone in his beliefs, he does not meet the DSM-IV criteria for delusion. However, you might well consider your homophobic neighbor almost as delusional, and probably more offensive, than your cable-fearing neighbor. He, too, seems to be responding to forces, threats, and agents that do not exist, only in this case his widely shared beliefs have real victims: the millions of men and women who are prohibited from marrying the people they love, and who are treated unjustly in matters of family law and social prestige. If only there were some way to break through your neighbor's delusions-some moral equivalent of Thorazine-which would help him see the facts as you see them.

Additionally, each foundation is defined in full. In my mind, I cannot understand how all five foundations can be given equal consideration. In order to ensure its survival, authority often becomes oppressive through the harming of others and the subjugation of fairness. Deference to authority is usually manifested through loyalty to the group. So, not only is individualism an affront to authority, it threatens the existence of the group and the life of every member. For more reading on authority and loyalty, 1984 covers the dangers associated with group thought and group submission well.