Most moral disagreements are not about facts. Two people can agree on what happened and still disagree about whether it was wrong, because each weighs a different concern. Moral foundations theory tries to name those concerns.
This guide explains the six foundations, what changed in the second version of the questionnaire, and how our moral foundations test compares your scores with samples from 19 countries.
Moral foundations theory holds that people build their moral judgments on several distinct intuitions. The Moral Foundations Questionnaire-2 (Atari et al., 2023) measures six: Care, Equality, Proportionality, Loyalty, Authority, and Purity, with six statements each. It splits the original fairness foundation into equality of outcomes and rewards proportional to contribution.
The six foundations
The Moral Foundations Questionnaire-2 (Atari et al., 2023) measures six foundations with six statements each, rated from "does not describe me at all" to "describes me extremely well".
- ✦Care: concern for people who are suffering, and for kindness and compassion.
- ✦Equality: fairness as equal outcomes.
- ✦Proportionality: fairness as rewards that match effort and contribution.
- ✦Loyalty: standing with your country, community, or team.
- ✦Authority: respect for tradition, elders, and leadership.
- ✦Purity: the sense that some things are sacred and can be degraded.
Fairness is now two foundations
The first questionnaire had a single fairness foundation. The MFQ-2 splits it into Equality and Proportionality, and across 19 countries the two correlated only .21 on average. Someone can care a great deal about equal shares and little about deserved shares, or the reverse — two different ideas of what fair means.
Scores differ across countries
The authors surveyed nationally stratified samples in 19 countries, about 205 adults each. National averages varied a lot, and Purity varied most with cultural distance from the United States: less Western, educated, industrialised, rich, and democratic populations endorsed it substantially more. The older grouping of foundations into "individualizing" and "binding" sets held in American data but not everywhere, which is why our report keeps all six separate.
Not a political label
Moral foundations became known through research on politics: on average, people who call themselves more liberal score higher on Care and Equality, and those who call themselves more conservative higher on Loyalty, Authority, Purity, and Proportionality. These are averages across many people. A single person's scores do not reveal their politics, and no foundation is the nobler one to score high on.
How our test measures it
We administer the 36 MFQ-2 items verbatim from the authors' materials, released under CC BY 4.0, and the Chinese version uses the authors' own translation. Each foundation is the mean of its six items. Your scores are compared with the 19 national samples pooled with equal weight, and with the range of their national averages — never as a percentile. The free result shows the two foundations you weigh most.