Mental representation of morality: The endorsement pattern of moral foundations among Iranians

Rooted in the intuitionist approach to moral judgment, Moral Foundations Theory provides a reasonable coverage of moral concerns. It assumes a pluralistic first draft to the moral mind which develops under the influence of the environment and leads to cross-cultural differences in judgment of right and wrong. This study examines the mental representations of Iranians regarding morality using MFT as the framework. Participants were 172 Iranian adults. Their views on ideal society, and immoral and moral behaviors were obtained using open-ended questions which provided three different contexts to evoke morality-related conceptions. Responses were divided up into chunks and each chunk was categorized as belonging to moral foundations. A repeated measures analysis of variance was carried out with frequency of reference to foundations as the dependent variable being predicted by two within-subjects factors of question and moral foundation. Fairness, care, and sanctity were found to be the most salient moral foundations, whereas liberty and loyalty ranked last. Moreover, the interaction of question and foundation was significant. The pattern of Iranians' endorsement of foundations seems to be a blend of Western and Eastern moral profiles. The results also suggest that the pattern of reference to foundations was sensitive to semantic context. Notably, liberty, which is the recent addition to the list of moral foundations, was more easily evoked in the context of views on ideal society than within the context of questions on moral and immoral behaviors.