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The genetic and environmental foundations of morality
Abstract
It has been consistently found that individual differences in beliefs, value priorities, and attitudes are due to both environmental and genetic influences. In this study, we investigated the effects of nature and nurture on individual differences in five universally observable but differently developed moral intuitions: Harm/Care (i.e., avoiding harm to others), Fairness/Reciprocity (i.e., doing the right things to ensure fair treatment for all), Ingroup/Loyalty (i.e., having a system that protects the social institutions of family, community, and country), Authority/Respect (i.e., complying with duty, authorities, laws, and tradition), and Purity/Sanctity (i.e., preferring religious norms, decency, and maintaining purity of mind).
Data from 546 twins (102 monozygotic and 171 dizygotic twin pairs) who already participated in the ongoing Study of Personality Architecture and Dynamics (www.speady.de) were analyzed. We estimated genetic and environmental sources of individual differences in moral intuitions using a latent variable approach to control for error of measurement.
The results indicate that individual differences in Harm/Care and Fairness/Reciprocity were primarily due to genetic influences (76% and 44%) and individual-specific environmental factors (21% and 50%), whereas variance in Ingroup/Loyalty and Authority/Respect was primarily attributable to environmental influences shared (26% and 33%) and not shared by twins (62% and 67%). Purity/Sanctity showed significant genetic (22%) and shared (33%) as well as nonshared environmental (45%) variance components. Genetically informative common factor analyses indicated that a common factor of Harm/Care, Fairness/Reciprocity, and Ingroup/Loyalty mediated most of the genetic variance in these variables, whereas a common factor of Ingroup/Loyalty, Authority/Respect, and Purity/Sanctity mediated most of their shared environmental variance components. These results will be discussed against the background of the structure and theory of moral foundations and related constructs, such as value priorities and political attitudes.
(The authors received support from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft KA 4088/2-1)
... For completeness, it should be noted that these twenty items differ by three items from the 20 chosen for wave 2 by Smith et al. (2017). Kandler et al. (2019) conducted univariate assessments of the heritability of latent scores, modelling items as indicators of latent foundations rather than sum scores (Kandler & Zapko-Willmes, 2017). The Harm/Care and Fairness/Reciprocity foundations showed high and significant heritability. ...
Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) predicts that moral behaviour reflects at least five foundational traits, each hypothesised to be heritable. Here, we report two independent twin studies (total n = 2020), using multivariate multi-group common pathway models to test the following three predictions from the MFT: (1) The moral foundations will show significant heritability; (2) The moral foundations will each be genetically distinct and (3) The clustering of moral concerns around individualising and binding domains will show significant heritability. Supporting predictions 1 and 3, Study 1 showed evidence for significant heritability of two broad moral factors corresponding to individualising and binding domains. In Study 2, we added the second dataset, testing replication of the Study 1 model in a joint approach. This further corroborated evidence for heritable influence, showed strong influences on the individualising and binding domains (h ² = 49% and 66%, respectively) and, partially supporting prediction 2, showed foundation-specific, heritable influences on Harm/Care, Fairness/Reciprocity and Purity/Sanctity foundations. A general morality factor was required, also showing substantial genetic effects (40%). These findings indicate that moral foundations have significant genetic bases. These influenced the individual foundations themselves as well as a general concern for the individual, for the group, and overall moral concern.
The Study of Personality Architecture and Dynamics (SPeADy) is a German research project that aims to investigate the sources of interindividual differences in intraindividual personality development. The main focus lies in the dynamic interplay between more stable core characteristics and more environmentally malleable surface characteristics, as well as between personality and life experiences over time. SPeADy includes a twin family study encompassing data from 1962 individuals (age: 14–94) of 682 families, including 570 complete twin pairs (plus 1 triplet set), 327 parents, 236 spouses and 145 children of twins. Data collection started in 2016 and data from the first wave are currently obtainable as open source. Available data comprise a broad range of personality variables, such as personality trait constructs, motives, interests, values, moral foundations, religiosity and self-related concepts. For the currently ongoing second wave of data collection, we added retrospective reports on major life events. Special features of this genetically informative study are the extended twin family data and its longitudinal design. Three assessment waves in 2 years’ intervals are planned until 2022. In this article, we briefly describe the design and contents of the SPeADy twin family study as well as some recent findings, future plans and open science issues.
Suppose you are an architect and you have recently completed a challenging project: designing and building a sturdy modern house on a sandy stretch of ground where several previous architects had failed. The shifting ground had cracked their one-piece rigid concrete foundations. You vowed not to repeat their mistakes, so you designed a novel foundational system that avoided the use of concrete altogether. You drove steel rods down into rockier soil, created five independent platforms to support five modular units, and then linked the units together with short flexible corridors. You left plenty of room for expansion—the modular design makes it easy for the homeowner to add additional units as needed. The initial reviews of your modular house are excellent, and other architects begin applying your technique, with good results. 1 Imagine your trepidation, then, when a major architectural critic writes a review entitled " Af oundation built on sand?", in which she warns that your house will soon collapse and that your project is useful primarily as an object lesson in what not to do. You begin reading the review. It starts off with an extremely accurate summary of the design challenges you faced and of the innovative ways that you met those challenges. It praises you for having solved four of the major problems that doomed previous attempts to build on this sandy ground. (You are grateful for this praise.) So imagine your confusion as you continue to read and discover that your criticʼs three major complaints are as follows:
The moral domain is broader than the empathy and justice concerns assessed by existing measures of moral competence, and it is not just a subset of the values assessed by value inventories. To fill the need for reliable and theoretically grounded measurement of the full range of moral concerns, we developed the Moral Foundations Questionnaire on the basis of a theoretical model of 5 universally available (but variably developed) sets of moral intuitions: Harm/Care, Fairness/Reciprocity, Ingroup/Loyalty, Authority/Respect, and Purity/Sanctity. We present evidence for the internal and external validity of the scale and the model, and in doing so we present new findings about morality: (a) Comparative model fitting of confirmatory factor analyses provides empirical justification for a 5-factor structure of moral concerns; (b) convergent/discriminant validity evidence suggests that moral concerns predict personality features and social group attitudes not previously considered morally relevant; and (c) we establish pragmatic validity of the measure in providing new knowledge and research opportunities concerning demographic and cultural differences in moral intuitions. These analyses provide evidence for the usefulness of Moral Foundations Theory in simultaneously increasing the scope and sharpening the resolution of psychological views of morality.
How and why do moral judgments vary across the political spectrum? To test moral foundations theory (J. Haidt & J. Graham, 2007; J. Haidt & C. Joseph, 2004), the authors developed several ways to measure people's use of 5 sets of moral intuitions: Harm/care, Fairness/reciprocity, Ingroup/loyalty, Authority/respect, and Purity/sanctity. Across 4 studies using multiple methods, liberals consistently showed greater endorsement and use of the Harm/care and Fairness/reciprocity foundations compared to the other 3 foundations, whereas conservatives endorsed and used the 5 foundations more equally. This difference was observed in abstract assessments of the moral relevance of foundation-related concerns such as violence or loyalty (Study 1), moral judgments of statements and scenarios (Study 2), "sacredness" reactions to taboo trade-offs (Study 3), and use of foundation-related words in the moral texts of religious sermons (Study 4). These findings help to illuminate the nature and intractability of moral disagreements in the American "culture war."
Originally developed to explain cultural variation in moral judgments, moral foundations theory (MFT) has become widely adopted as a theory of political ideology. MFT posits that political attitudes are rooted in instinctual evaluations generated by innate psychological modules evolved to solve social dilemmas. If this is correct, moral foundations must be relatively stable dispositional traits, changes in moral foundations should systematically predict consequent changes in political orientations, and, at least in part, moral foundations must be heritable. We test these hypotheses and find substantial variability in individual-level moral foundations across time, and little evidence that these changes account for changes in political attitudes. We also find little evidence that moral foundations are heritable. These findings raise questions about the future of MFT as a theory of ideology. Replication Materials: The data, code, and any additional materials required to replicate all analyses in this article are available on the American Journal of Political Science Dataverse within the Harvard Dataverse Network, at: http://dx.doi.org/10.7910/DVN/WTUGFZ.
- J Haidt
• Haidt, J. (2008). Morality. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 3, 65-72.