Moral Foundations Questionnaire

MFQ-30

psychologysocial scienceshumanitiesFree for research use

A 30-item measure of the five moral foundations identified in Moral Foundations Theory: Care/Harm, Fairness/Reciprocity, Loyalty/Betrayal (Ingroup), Authority/Subversion (Respect), and Sanctity/Purity. The form uses two item types — relevance judgments (Part 1) and agreement with moral statements (Part 2) — three of each per foundation.

Items

Response format

6-point response scale (relevance: Not at all relevant → Extremely relevant; judgment: Strongly disagree → Strongly agree)

Version

1.0

Subscales

Ready-to-cite methods sentence

Moral intuitions were assessed with the 30-item Moral Foundations Questionnaire (MFQ-30; Graham et al., 2011), which measures five foundations — Harm/Care, Fairness/Reciprocity, Ingroup/Loyalty, Authority/Respect, and Purity/Sanctity — each with three relevance and three judgment items on a 6-point scale.

Reliability & validation

Validation population

Large-N online samples (yourmorals.org) and MTurk samples reported in Graham et al. (2011)

Cronbach's α

[object Object]

Subscales

Harm/CareFairness/ReciprocityIngroup/LoyaltyAuthority/RespectPurity/Sanctity

Response anchors

Not at all relevant / Strongly disagree · 2 · 3 · 4 · 5 · Extremely relevant / Strongly agree

Known limitations

Administer with two catch/validity items (one in each half) but exclude them from scoring — they are not included here. The five-factor structure has been debated; some analyses collapse the foundations into an Individualising (Harm + Fairness) vs. Binding (Loyalty + Authority + Purity) dimension. The MFQ-30 is the most widely cited form; MFQ-2 (Atari et al., 2023) is the current successor with improved psychometrics.

Original citation

Graham, J., Nosek, B. A., Haidt, J., Iyer, R., Koleva, S., Ditto, P. H. (2011). Mapping the moral domain. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 101(2), 366-385.

https://doi.org/10.1037/a0021847

Use MFQ-30 in Folio Surveyor

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Library entry verified January 2024. Metadata is provided for reference; item wording is available inside Folio Surveyor, subject to each instrument's licensing.