What Is Your Moral Compass Made Of?
The five things people mean by wrong, and which ones you actually feel
Two reasonable people can look at the same act and one feels it is wrong while the other feels nothing, and neither is lying. Moral psychology's best-known account of this says the sense of wrong is built from several distinct foundations - harm, fairness, loyalty, authority, purity - and that people differ in which ones are switched on. The arguments that go nowhere are usually two people running on different foundations and each assuming the other has none.
Before you start There are no right answers. Pick what is usually true for you, not what sounds best.
Fifteen statements about what makes something wrong. There are no correct answers; answer with the gut, not with the position you would defend.
What it measures
The five foundations of the original questionnaire: care (harm and suffering), fairness (cheating and reciprocity), loyalty (the group and betrayal), authority (order, tradition and respect) and purity (degradation and the sacred). Each is measured on its own; the shape across all five is the result.
Based on: Moral Foundations Questionnaire (Graham et al., 2011)
Possible results
Care
Wrong is what causes suffering.
Fairness
Wrong is cheating and taking more than your share.
Loyalty
Wrong is betraying your own.
Authority
Wrong is disrespect for order and tradition.
Purity
Wrong is what degrades, even when it harms no one.
Common questions
Is one profile better than another?
The research does not say so, and the theory's own claim is the opposite: each foundation solved a problem that human groups actually faced, and a community with none of one of them tends to fail in a characteristic way. What the profile is good for is not ranking but translation. When you cannot understand why someone is outraged, the likeliest explanation is that a foundation you barely feel is one they feel strongly, and once you can name it, the argument at least becomes about something.
Why did I score high on something I do not believe in?
Because the foundations are about feeling, not doctrine, and the theory's central claim is that the feeling comes first and the reasons arrive afterwards to explain it. It is entirely common to hold the position that only harm matters and still flinch at something degrading that harmed nobody. The flinch is the foundation. What you do with it - overrule it, trust it, examine it - is where your beliefs come in, and the two are allowed to disagree.
Sources
- 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.
An honest note This is a short adaptation of the 30-item questionnaire, with three questions per foundation, so each bar is a sketch rather than a measurement. Two things about the science. The theory has been influential and the questionnaire widely used, but its structure has been revised by its own authors - a second version published in 2023 splits fairness into equality and proportionality and reworks the items after the original showed uneven reliability across cultures - so the five-part picture here is the classic version rather than the current one. And the foundations are best known for the finding that they track political orientation. This test deliberately does not score that. It describes what you feel when you judge, which is more interesting and more useful than a label, and a person's profile across the five is not a reliable guide to how they vote.
Try one of these next
How Utilitarian Is Your Moral Thinking?
Harming one to save many, and caring about strangers as much as friends, are not the same question
How Easily Do You Justify Bending the Rules?
The quiet reasoning that lets decent people do things they would normally condemn
How Much Do You Need a Clear Answer?
Order, predictability, quick decisions and the itch of an open question