Examining Social-cognitive Characteristics of the Mental Representation of Moral Concerns: Grouping, Motivational Orientation and Relational Context of Moral Foundations

Moral Foundations Theory is among the latest theories of moral judgement in social cognition. This theory has specified six foundations of care, fairness, loyalty, authority, sanctity, and liberty as underlying morality concerns. The present study aimed to examine the characteristics of these foundations in Iranian moral mentality and compare it against foreign findings and predictions, particularly the recent debate between two leading theorists in this field, i.e. Graham and Janoff-Bulman. Participants were 172 Iranians who were questioned about ideal society, and moral and immoral behaviors. Responses were examined and categorized based on belongingness to foundations. Accordingly, foundation exemplars and their motivational weight and relational context were determined. To determine the grouping of foundations, exploratory factor analysis, to compare foundations regarding motivational weight, analysis of variance, and to compare the frequency of foundation exemplars between relational contexts, chi-square test was used. The number of extracted factors from the foundations was three in the contxt of each of the three questions. Foundations were found to differ regarding motivational weight; however, almost all of them had exemplars from both motivational orientations. Moreover, despite the focus of each foundation on one or two particular relational contexts, almost all foundations had exemplars referring to all three relational contexts. Findings provide support for the three-folded super-structure of morality. Results also indicate that Janoff-Bulman has drawn a narrow image of the motivational orientation of foundations, just as assumptions of moral foundation theorists underestimate the variability in relational contexts of foundations.