Whistleblowing is increasingly viewed as a valuable mechanism to root out misconduct and corruption, yet we know very little about the conditions under which it is used in political parties. Building upon literature from social psychology, this study argues that the decision to blow the whistle on party colleagues is the outcome of a trade-off between two basic moral values that are particularly acute in the case of politicians: fairness and loyalty. Using a novel pre-registered survey experiment with over 1,000 Swedish politicians, this paper establishes that priming values of fairness can increase a politician’s willingness to blow the whistle against fellow party members. However, priming values of loyalty has no effect on whistleblowing intentions relative to control conditions. Results also suggest that severe misconduct is more likely to be reported only when it was committed by an individual rather than the party collectively, and that the party’s inaction is the biggest cause of external whistleblowing. The results of this study have significant implications for our understanding of the impact of organisational cultures and accountability on the behaviour of politicians.

We apply moral foundations theory (MFT) to explore how the public conceptualizes the first eight months of the conflict between Ukraine and the Russian Federation (Russia). Our analysis includes over 1.1 million English tweets related to the conflict over the first 36 weeks. We used linguistic inquiry word count (LIWC) and a moral foundations dictionary to identify tweets’ moral components (care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and sanctity) from the United States, pre- and post-Cold War NATO countries, Ukraine, and Russia. Following an initial spike at the beginning of the conflict, tweet volume declined and stabilized by week 10. The level of moral content varied significantly across the five regions and the five moral components. Tweets from the different regions included significantly different moral foundations to conceptualize the conflict. Across all regions, tweets were dominated by loyalty content, while fairness content was infrequent. Moral content over time was relatively stable, and variations were linked to reported conflict events.

Moral judgments are shaped by socialization and cultural heritage. Understanding how moral considerations vary across the globe requires the systematic development of moral stimuli for use in different cultures and languages. Focusing on Dutch populations, we adapted and validated two recent instruments for examining moral judgments: (1) the Moral Foundations Vignettes (MFVs) and (2) the Socio-Moral Image Database (SMID). We translated all 120 MFVs from English into Dutch and selected 120 images from SMID that primarily display moral, immoral, or neutral content. A total of 586 crowd-workers from the Netherlands provided over 38,460 individual judgments for both stimuli sets on moral and affective dimensions. For both instruments, we find that moral judgments and relationships between the moral foundations and political orientation are similar to those reported in the US, Australia, and Brazil. We provide the validated MFV and SMID images, along with associated rating data, to enable a broader study of morality.

Advocates of gender quotas emphasize their transformative potential for women’s political participation. Yet evidence on the symbolic effects of quotas remains inconclusive, with some studies uncovering significant backlash after implementation. Although elite resistance to quotas has been posited as an explanation, the underlying mechanisms generating negative effects remain underexplored. This study proposes the utilization of “moral panic” by elites as a mechanism of resistance. By leveraging their media influence and employing conservative moral rhetoric, elites engineer moral panic, framing women’s political engagement as detrimental to social order and gender hierarchies. Such panic aims to incite public opposition and rationalize elite resistance to progressive changes. Notably, this tactic is more prevalent in countries with reserved-seat quotas, where elites possess limited control over electoral outcomes. Using an original dataset encompassing politician names and genders, I analyze over 150,000 news articles from 2000 to 2021 across 10 sub-Saharan African countries. The findings indicate that quota-induced gains in women’s representation are followed by significant increases in conservative ethical language in news coverage of women politicians, particularly in countries with reserved-seat quotas. These findings bear important implications for gender equality in politics and shed light on the dynamics of backlash after quota implementation.

After drawing a distinction between “class” and “status,” an early but short-lived sociological literature on status politics is reviewed. That approach has lost favor, but moral foundations theory (MFT) offers a new opportunity to link morality policy to status politics. While any of the five moral foundations (care, fairness, loyalty, authority, sanctity) can provoke conflict over status, most often sanctity is the cause of status politics because it engages the emotion of disgust. Disgust drives the behavioral immune system, which prevents us from being infected by contaminants in tainted food or by “outsiders” who are perceived to follow unconventional practices. This research note concludes by referencing 20 empirical studies in which feelings of disgust targeted certain groups or practices in society (i.e., immigrants, criminals, abortion). Thus, status politics is the origin of morality policy.

Focusing on the ideological and worldview premises of moral reasoning, our study (N = 313) has as a starting point the well-known relationship between morality and distributive justice norms. We examined the serially mediating role of progressiveness on morality, moral absolutism, and consistency norm on the relationship between ideological/worldview perspectives and distributional criteria. Three groups of respondents were formed based on participants’ ideological and worldview perceptions and then serial mediation analysis was conducted. The present findings suggest that morality is predicted by ideology and worldview and predicts attitudes toward the norms of equity and welfare chauvinism, through moral absolutism and interpretations of consistency norm, thus confirming our hypothesis. Moderate Passive Individualists emerged as the group who adopts the most progressive and inclusive attitude towards moral evaluations and practices, while Demobilized Collectivists and Neoliberals maintain a more conservative attitude towards issues that are subjected to moral framing. Our findings shed light on the crucial role of consistency norm, which has not received enough attention until now.

How do politicians use moral appeals in their rhetoric? Previous research suggests that morality plays an important role in elite communication and that the endorsement of specific values varies systematically across the ideological spectrum. We argue that this view is incomplete since it only focuses on whether certain values are endorsed and not how they are contextualized by politicians. Using a novel sentence embedding approach, we show that although liberal and conservative politicians use the same moral terms, they attach diverging meanings to these values. Accordingly, the politics of morality is not about the promotion of specific moral values per se but, rather, a competition over their respective meaning. Our results highlight that simple dictionary-based methods to measure moral rhetoric may be insufficient since they fail to account for the semantic contexts in which words are used and, therefore, risk overlooking important features of political communication and party competition.

Moral rhetoric presents a strategic dilemma for female politicians, who must navigate stereotypes while appealing to copartisan voters. In this article, we investigate how gender shapes elite moral rhetoric given the influence of partisanship, ideology, gender stereotypes, and moral psychology. Drawing on moral foundations theory, we examine how female and male representatives differ in their emphasis on the five foundations of care, fairness, authority, loyalty, and purity. Using the Moral Foundations Dictionary, we analyze a corpus of 2.23 million tweets by U.S. Congress members between 2013 and 2021. We find that female representatives are more likely to emphasize care and less likely to emphasize authority and loyalty than their male peers. However, when subsetting by party, we find that gender effects are most pronounced among Democrats and largely negligible among Republicans. These findings offer insight into the rhetorical dynamics of political leadership at the intersection of gender and partisan identities.

The Moral Foundations Vignettes (MFVs) – a recently developed set of brief scenarios depicting violations of various moral foundations – enables investigators to directly examine differences in moral judgments about different topics. In the present study, we adapt the MFV instrument for use in the Portuguese language. To this end, the following steps were performed: 1) Translation of the MFV instrument from English to Portuguese language in Brazil; 2) Synthesis of translated versions; 3) Evaluation of the synthesis by expert judges; 4) Evaluation of the MFV instrument by university students from Sao Paulo City; 5) Back translation; and lastly, 6) Validation study, which used a sample of 494 (385f) university students from Sao Paulo city and a set of 68 vignettes, subdivided into seven factors. Exploratory analyses show that the relationships between the moral foundations and political ideology are similar to those found in previous studies, but the severity of moral judgment on individualizing foundations tended to be significantly higher in the Sao Paulo sample, compared to a sample from the USA. Overall, the present study provides a Portuguese version of the MFV that performs similarly to the original English version, enabling a broader examination of how the moral foundations operate.

Recent research has shown that religious individuals are much more resistant to utilitarian modes of thinking than their less religious counterparts, but the reason for this is not clear. We propose that a meta-ethical belief that morality is rooted in inviolable divine commands (i.e., endorsement of Divine Command Theory) may help explain this finding. We present a novel 20-item scale measuring a belief that morality is founded on divine authority. The scale shows good internal reliability and convergent and discriminant validity. Study 1 found that this scale fully mediated the relationship that various religiosity measures had with a deontological thinking style in our sample of American adults. It also accounted for the link between religiosity and social conservative values. Furthermore, the relationship between the scale and these outcome variables held after statistically controlling for variables related to actively open-minded thinking and the Big Five. Study 2 replicated the results using naturalistic moral dilemmas that placed deontological and utilitarian concerns in conflict, and showed that the results of Study 1 cannot be explained by differences in moral foundations (e.g., concern for authority more generally) or differences in the perceived function of rules. Quite the contrary, endorsement of the divine origins of morality fully mediated the relationship religiosity had with the so-called “binding” foundations (i.e., Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity). Our findings highlight the importance of meta-ethical beliefs for understanding individual differences in moral judgment.

I present a novel way to conceptualize Turiel and colleagues’ Social Domain Theory (SDT), and Haidt and colleagues’ Moral Foundations Theory (MFT), as theories of how concepts of moral violations are mentally represented. I argue that SDT is best viewed as a theory of the features that are associated with concepts of moral violations, including wrongness, generalizability across cultures, and intrinsic harmfulness, and that MFT, in contrast, is best viewed as a theory of individual differences in what kinds of acts are categorized as moral violations (i.e., of category membership). This perspective generates a novel prediction: the same individual difference variables that predict variation in moral values according to MFT should predict ascription of the features predicted by SDT. That is, judgments of wrongness, generalizability, and intrinsic harmfulness should covary with the same predictors as do endorsed moral values, specifically, political orientation and analytic thinking. Three studies supported this hypothesis.

This article draws from Charles Taylor’s work of retrieval to advance moral foundations theory (MFT). Taylor’s contribution to MFT lies in his insistence that we retrieve the moral sources that have helped constitute, substantiate, and give meaning to individuals’ moral sensibilities. Applying Taylor’s insights to MFT, this article seeks to advance a view of moral foundations that connects them more explicitly to their underlying moral sources. Using this retrieved account of moral foundations, this article then addresses current issues within moral foundations research and theory. Finally, this article suggests ways in which Taylor’s philosophy can contribute to three areas within business ethics: ethical leadership, behavioral ethics, and ethics pedagogy.

Moral reasoning and decision making help guide behavior and facilitate interpersonal relationships. Accounts of morality that position commonsense psychology as the foundation of moral development, (i.e., rationalist theories) have dominated research in morality in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Given the well-documented differences in commonsense psychology among autistic individuals, researchers have investigated whether the development and execution of moral judgement and reasoning differs in this population compared with neurotypical individuals. In light of the diverse findings of investigations of moral development and reasoning in ASD, a summation and critical evaluation of the literature could help make sense of what is known about this important social-cognitive skill in ASD. To that end, we conducted a systematic review of the literature investigating moral decision making among autistic children and adults. Our search identified 29 studies. In this review, we synthesize the research in the area and provide suggestions for future research. Such research could include the application of an alternative theoretical framework to studying morality in autism spectrum disorder that does not assume a deficits-based perspective.

This paper scrutinizes two research programs that advocate respectively for the existence of a universal moral grammar and a predisposition to moralize behaviours with certain contents. It focuses on how the arguments commonly used to ground each program fare at relevant contemporary research in cognitive science and how well they meet constructivist arguments proposed by Jesse Prinz and Kim Sterelny, among others. We argue that there is little evidence that our moral judgements follow the model of principles and parameters. At the same time, ‘ease of learning’ suggests that the human brain is somehow prepared to learn moral rules.