Recap: According to Moral Foundations Theory, there are five core moral intuitions: Care/Harm, Fairness/Reciprocity, Loyalty/Ingroup, Sanctity/Purity, and Authority/Respect. Much research has been conducted on the relation between moral intuitions and political identity, with pretty consistent findings: liberals value Care/Harm a bit more than Conservatives and conservatives value Loyalty/Ingroup, Sanctity/Purity, and Authority/Respect more than liberals.

The Moral Foundations Questionnaire (MFQ) has been the primary tool for measuring the moral intuitions. Here are some sample MFQ items:

When you decide whether something is right or wrong, to what extent are the following considerations relevant to your thinking?

  • Whether or not someone violated standards of purity and decency
  • Whether or not someone conformed to the traditions of society
  • Whether or not someone acted in a way that God would approve of

Please read the following sentences and indicate your agreement or disagreement:

  • I am proud of my country’s history
  • Men and women each have different roles to play in society
  • I would call some acts wrong on the grounds that they are unnatural.
  • Chastity is an important and valuable virtue.

Now consider that we signal who we are through the words we use and apply that lesson to the MFQ. I'll be brief: no self-respecting liberal would use the following terminology or concepts without wink wink irony: purity, decency, conformity, tradition, God as source of authority, pride of country, the rightness of gender roles, something being unnatural, chastity as virtue.

The MFQ is using political identity signifiers to predict political identity. The MFQ items that commit this sin are basically saying, "I am a liberal" and "I am not a conservative". In other words, they are not measuring the independent construct of moral intuition but the politicized expression of that construct. It should therefore come as no surprise that liberals score lower than conservatives on, say, Sanctity/Purity.

Someone should devise alternative versions of the MFQ to assess the effect of biased wording on scores (much like Conway et al did with a measure on complex thinking).  It would not be that hard to come up with liberal variations on the moral intuitions of Loyalty/Ingroup, Sanctity/Purity, and Authority/Respect. Come on - it doesn't take that much imagination. Think ethnic group loyalty (or progressive cause loyalty), the sanctity of nature, and the authority of the consensus in climate change. 

Reference:

Conway, L. G., Gornick, L. J., Houck, S. C., Anderson, C., Stockert, J., Sessoms, D. and McCue, K. (2016), Are Conservatives Really More Simple-Minded than Liberals? The Domain Specificity of Complex Thinking. Political Psychology, 37: 777–798. doi:10.1111/pops.12304