Cultural and Political Conservatism: The Significance of Moral Foundations

Assessing the effect of moral foundations on different aspects of socio-cultural and political life is difficult because there has not been sufficient data yet. However, doubtlessly, the influence of moral factors on humans’ behaviors is definitive. Although moral priorities are not necessarily determinant, they construct a complicated system of causal factors which can be important motivating factor in long term periods. Accordingly, the present study aims at investigate the effects of moral values on citizens’ orientations towards conservatism in cultural and political domains among students of University of Isfahan using Haidt and Graham’s Moral Foundations Theory. The present study also is to compare the degree of the relative significance of moral foundations as a variable determining of each ideas of political and cultural conservatism. The results of the present study indicate that moral foundations with coefficient determination as 45% can explain the highest variance of cultural conservatism. In addition, findings of the present study indicate that only two variables of care and respecting authority are effective on political conservatism, while care morality causes the reduction in political conservatism and the variable of respecting authority causes the increase in tendency towards political conservatism.