Motivating Morality: Linking Moral Foundations and Fundamental Motives

Abstract

What motivates moral judgments? The fundamental motives model proposes that people have a set of psychological mechanisms that motivate behavior (Kenrick et al, 2011). The self protection motive functions to protect one from threats from others or from pathogens. Moral Foundations Theory proposes that people rely on a set of moral intuitions when making moral judgments (Graham et al., 2011). The sanctity/degradation foundation is one of these moral intuitions. However, an initial examination of a relationship between the self-protection motive and sanctity/degradation moral foundation revealed no relationship. Alternatively, trends were found among other foundations associated with group cohesion: the loyalty/betrayal and authority/subversion foundations. Such a relationship seems reasonable given activation of the self-protection motive is associated with ingroup preferential phenomena such as ingroup biases and outgroup prejudice (Becker et al., 2010; Kenrick, 2011), just as are the loyalty/betrayal and authority/subversion foundations (Graham et al., 2013). Lack of an effect on the sanctity foundation may also support the idea that the self-protection motive serves two separate functions: self-protection from physical harm and self-protection from pathogen exposure (Neuberg, Kenrick, & Schaller, 2011). Therefore, it was explored how concerns with self protection from pathogen cues and concerns with self-protection from physical threat are related to moral judgments. Expected interactions were not found. However, exploratory analyses were conducted and discussed further.