What is your moral compass made of?
Moral Foundations Theory holds that moral judgment is built on five intuitive foundations: Care, Fairness, Loyalty, Authority and Purity. People weight them differently, and those weightings explain a lot about why decent people disagree so fiercely.
Two short parts: first, rate how relevant various considerations are when you decide something is right or wrong; then rate your agreement with a series of statements. There are no right answers, and two check questions catch autopilot responding.
The science
Moral Foundations Theory, developed by Jonathan Haidt, Jesse Graham and colleagues, argues that human morality is built on a small set of evolved intuitions: protecting the vulnerable (Care), reciprocity and justice (Fairness), cohesion with one's group (Loyalty), respect for hierarchy and tradition (Authority), and a sense of sanctity and contamination (Purity). Moral reasoning, on this view, is mostly post-hoc: the intuitions fire first.
The MFQ is the standard instrument for measuring how much each foundation matters to a person; this is the official 20-item short form, including its two catch items. The theory's most famous finding is political: across large samples, self-identified liberals lean heavily on Care and Fairness while rating Loyalty, Authority and Purity much lower, whereas conservatives weight all five foundations more evenly (Graham, Haidt & Nosek, 2009). That asymmetry (not a difference in whether people are moral, but in what morality is made of) predicts positions on a wide range of contested issues.
Honest caveats
The reference profile shown with your results comes from large web-volunteer samples, which lean educated, Western and liberal, so your distance from it partly reflects who takes online questionnaires. The five-factor structure has also been debated (some analyses prefer two factors: individualising vs. binding), and a revised MFQ-2 exists. Read your profile as a description of your moral attention, not a moral report card: every foundation has both noble and troubling expressions.
- 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.
- Haidt, J. (2012). The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. Pantheon.