Analysis 4: Evaluative foci predict patterns of moral foundations

Analysis 4 seeks to examine the relationship between evaluative foci and systems of moral foundations, using the Moral Foundations Questionnaire (MFQ; Graham et al., 2009). It is already known that political liberals primarily rely upon two psychological foundations, the foundations of harm and fairness, whereas political conservatives rely more evenly upon all five psychological foundations. The structural hypothesis provides a possible explanation for these observed differences: Actions that violate the individualizing foundations, such as sticking a pin into the palm of a child or cheating in a game of cards, involve an agent harming one or more patients. By contrast, actions that violate the binding foundations, such as burning one‘s national flag or

cooking and eating one‘s dead pet dog, feature agents performing reprehensible acts that in many instances do not entail harmful outcomes to patients. They of course may do so: insulting a family member, or cursing one‘s nation on the radio, for instance, likely bring about some victim distress in each case. But critically, an action need not entail a harmful outcome in order to constitute a violation of the loyalty, authority or purity foundations.

Consequently, we predict a strong relationship between outcome focus and concern with the harm and fairness foundations, sometimes referred to as

individualizing foundations. We also predicted a strong relationship between action

focus and the harm and fairness foundations, insofar as one might be motivated by an aversion to harmful or unfair actions just as much as by the outcomes they produce (Cushman et al., 2012; Miller et al., 2013). For the purity, authority and loyalty foundations—sometimes referred to as binding foundations—we predicted a strong relationship with action items alone. Thus, the individuals who exhibit agent focus should demonstrate greater concern for the binding foundations than patient-focused individuals demonstrate.

5.5.1. Methods

571 participants (323 females) voluntarily logged on to the Moral Sense Test, read a brief introduction to the study and provided their written consent. Next, participants completed the assessment of evaluative focus developed in Chapter 4 along with the MFQ. 93 participants who demonstrated inattentiveness through the catch items in the MFQ were excluded from subsequent analyses. At the end of experiment, participants optionally provided demographic information.

5.5.2. Results

As predicted, the extent to which participants exhibited an evaluative focus on actions correlated with their concern for all five foundations, whereas the extent to

which they emphasized outcomes correlated only with their concern for individualizing foundations (see Figure 18, and statistical tests presented in Table 11). Next we examined the measures of third-party evaluation and found the corresponding pattern of relations: ratings of evaluative simulation correlated with moralization across all five foundations, whereas ratings of outcome assessment correlated only with moralization of the individualizing foundations (see Table 11).

Figure 18. Relevance of the individualizing (left) and binding (right) foundations by

action and outcome focus.

Table 11. Evaluative foci and moral foundations: correlations.

Harm Fairness Loyalty Authority Purity

Action focus .288*** .224*** .278*** .376*** .451***

Outcome focus .431*** .420*** .075 -.014 .018

Agent perspective-taking .132** .102* .139** .198*** .230*** Patient perspective-taking .312*** .322*** -.025 -.053 -.071

Notes. * p < .05; ** p < .01; *** p < .001.

Looking at the dichotomous endorsement measure, we found that participants who reported adopting the agent‘s perspective in third-party evaluation judged the 1 2 3 4 5 6 1 2 3 4 5 Outcome Action 1 2 3 4 5 6 1 2 3 4 5 Outcome Action

individualizing foundations as less relevant, and the binding foundations as more relevant, to them than did participants who reported adopting the patient‘s perspective, individualizing t(477) = -3.76, p < .0005, binding t(477) = 2.23, p = .026. This relationship was confirmed on the bipolar relative rating of agent vs. patient perspective-taking: as participants rated agent perspective-taking more favorably than patient perspective-taking, they tended to judge the individualizing foundations as less relevant, r = .153, p < .001, and the binding foundations as more relevant to their moral judgment, r = -.150, p < .001.

We then entered our measures of evaluative focus along with social political orientation into separate multiple regressions predicting each of the moral foundations (see Supplementary Analysis 2). Still, we observed significant effects of action focus on all five foundations, .185 < βs < .371, ps < .001, and of outcome focus on the individualizing foundations, .333 < βs < .369, ps < .001, after controlling for the effects of political orientation. Similarly, we entered our measures of third-party evaluation along with social political orientation into separate multiple regressions predicting each of the moral foundations (see also Supplementary Analysis 3). Here too we observed independent effects of evaluative simulation on the individualizing foundations, .162 <

βs < .181, ps < .001, and outcome assessment, .291 < βs < .336, ps < .001, after

controlling for political orientation. The effects of evaluative simulation on each of the binding foundations after controlling for political orientation were significant .098 < βs < .163, ps < .05, though their overall sizes were small. In sum, the effects of participants‘ evaluative foci on their pattern of moral foundations held even after controlling for political orientation.

In a follow-up study, we confirmed the above findings employing a complementary measure, the Moral Foundations Sacredness Scale (MFSS; Graham et al., 2009). On the MFSS, participants are requested to imagine performing a series of

actions. The actions listed on MFSS are moral violations corresponding to each of the five foundations, .e.g. ―Kick a dog in the head hard‖ (Harm), ―Renounce your citizenship and become a citizen of another country‖ (Loyalty), or ―Get a blood transfusion of 1 pint of disease-free, compatible blood from a convicted child molester‖ (Purity). Participants select the appropriate point on an 8-point logarithmic scale, indicating ―how much money someone would have to pay [them] (anonymously and secretly) to be willing to do each thing‖ (1: $0 I‘d do it for free, 2: $10, 3: $100, 4: $1000, 5: $10,000, 6: $100,000, 7: $1,000,000, 8: Never for any amount of money). As such, the MFSS provides a visceral counterpart to the more abstract MFQ. A measure of

unwillingness to violate (or sacredness of) a given foundation is derived by averaging

across the four items corresponding to each foundation. Since the MFSS measures the sacredness of each foundation in the participant‘s own behavior, in these analyses we were primarily interested in the relationships with measures of moral self-regulation. We found that both action and outcome foci correlated with moralization across all five foundations, all ps < .01. So, we entered action and outcome foci into separate multiple regression models for each foundation: action focus and outcome focus each explained unique variance in the sacredness of the harm and fairness foundations (all ps < .01), whereas only action focus explained unique variance in the loyalty, authority and purity foundations (action focus ps < .001; outcome focus ps > .1).

5.5.3. Discussion

As predicted, participants‘ evaluative focus on actions versus outcomes predicted the moral views of liberals and conservatives across different stimuli pertaining to the moral foundations. We found that an emphasis on actions was associated with a five foundation morality (the conservative moral profile) whereas an emphasis on outcomes was associated with a harm-based, two foundation morality (the liberal moral profile).