Moral Foundations Theory: An Exploratory Study with Accounting and Other Business Students

Margaret L. Andersen, Jill M. Zuber, Brent D. Hill

Journal of Business Ethics · 2015 · Volume 132 · Issue 3

Abstract

In this exploratory paper, we investigate the extension of Haidt’s (Psychol Rev 108(4):814–834,2001, The righteous mind: Why good people are divided by politics and religion,2012) Moral foundations theory (MFT), operationalized as the MFQ30 questionnaire, from a sample of the general public across many countries to a sample of business students. MFT posits that people rely on five major concerns, or foundations, when making moral judgments. The five concerns are care/harm, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, respect/authority, and purity/degradation. In addition, Haidt suggests that intuition, rather than reasoning, leads to moral judgment. We replicate Haidt’s measurement model and find that the measurement model based on our sample is consistent. This indicates support for MFT. Further, we find structural differences in the measurement model between the genders and between areas of study. Our findings suggest that all students in the sample focus substantially on the fairness foundation. Ethics education and research may seek to expand the number of moral foundations individuals consider when discerning whether something is right or wrong.

Keywords

Social intuitionist model, Moral foundations theory (MFT), Structural equation modeling, Measurement model, Ethics education, Multiple-groups analysis

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