There is a case to be made that our personality traits can be associated with the six moral foundations that were figured out by Dr. Jonathan Haidt. By looking at his work and breaking down the six moral foundations by words that are associated with them, I looked at the how they may map onto the ten facets of the Big Five model of personality.
By looking at the Big Five Aspects Scale and the six moral foundations I think a case can be made that our morality is deeply rooted in our temperament. We may be taught morality from our social sphere, but what sticks is what is tied to our personalities. The uploaded word document has the research that backs up this idea.
How Temperament and Personality are Connected to Moral Foundations Theory
Sean M. Sullivan M.S.
When it comes to understanding morality and where it comes from, the fundamentally religious people tend to think their get their morality from their religious faith and from the texts that their faith is based upon. Atheists tend to see morality as an objective construct. While yes, both views can be accurate, when one’s upbringing is taken into account as our parents both speak and embody an ethic that we learned as we grow and not just by listening, but acting out that ethic because we imitate the behaviors that our parents, siblings, and others within our social in-groups display.
This sets the foundation for morality of what we learn about right and wrong. However our moral foundations that guide our modes of being in the world in the way that people want to both compete and cooperate with us in the world in a way that works. Graham, Haidt, and Nosek (2009), investigated how morality tends to influence our political sphere. In American politics conservatives and liberals operate on different moral foundations to inform not only how these two groups formulate their policies, but also how people who are within these two political groups also vote. Political liberals ground their morality primarily upon two psychological foundations—Harm/care and Fairness/reciprocity—whereas political conservatives construct moral systems more evenly upon five psychological foundations, the same ones as liberals, plus In-group/loyalty, Authority/respect, and Purity/sanctity.
The idea of moral foundations and political affiliation evolved in when Iyer, Koleva, Graham, Ditto, and Haidt (2012), looked at libertarians and their moral foundation. They seem to be more concerned with a sixth foundation Liberty/oppression. See Fig.1. To solidify the moral foundations theory, libertarians conservatives, and liberals were asked to complete a moral foundations questionnaire (MFQ) and a Big Five assessment that measures the personality domains within the Five Factor Model (FFM) or simply as the Big Five.
The Big Five Personality Inventory (BFPI) instrument was used to measure scores along those five domains of personality. The BFPI is a 44-item measure of five personality traits often said to be the most reliable and widely accepted model of traits in personality psychology: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. The measure was completed by 29,043 participants (14,091 men; 19,106 liberals, 3,991 conservatives, and 2,615 libertarians).
The results show that libertarians scored lower than the other two groups on agreeableness, conscientiousness, and extraversion. They scored low (similar to conservatives) on neuroticism, and they scored quite high (similar to liberals) on openness to experience. Libertarians report lower levels of the traits that indicate an orientation toward engaging with and pleasing others (i.e., extraversion and agreeableness). Low scores on agreeableness in particular have been said to indicate a lack of compassion and a critical, skeptical nature. In addition, we see that libertarians share traits with liberals (high openness to experience) as well as conservatives (low neuroticism) (Iyer et al., 2012).
Figure 1. Libertarians have weaker intuitions about most moral concerns, but stronger intuitions about liberty.
doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0042366.g001
It is interesting how the analysis of the Big Five Personality Inventory scores show how libertarians score in comparison to conservatives and liberals. However, it is fair to say this is not sufficient to understand how moral foundations are related to personality. This is why the Big Five Aspect Scales (BFAS) should be used because it does break down each of the five down into their two lower order aspects. According to DeYoung, Quilty, and Peterson (2007), openness to experience can be broken down into openness/intellect; conscientiousness is broken down to industriousness/orderliness; agreeableness is broken down into compassion/politeness; extraversion is broken down into enthusiasm/assertiveness; and neuroticism is broken down into volatility/withdrawal. The six moral foundations according to Haidt (2012), are care/harm; fairness/cheating/; loyalty/betrayal; authority/subversion; sanctity/degradation; and liberty/oppression. To look at personality, temperament and moral foundations, the moral foundations need to be defined into their factors that would be associated with trait aspects of the Big Five.
The intellect aspect of Openness is associated with libertarian morality of reason over emotion. The orderliness aspect of Conscientiousness correlates to Disgust, Tradition, Proportionality, and Hierarchy. (Disgust/sanctity, tradition, and hierarchy are correlated to conservative morality. This is why conservatives score really high in trait conscientiousness compared to liberals or progressives. Proportionality is also an orderly moral trait, but it seems liberals score higher in this than conservatives.
The compassion aspect of agreeableness correlates to kindness, justice, nurture, self-sacrifice, gentleness, and in-group bonds, which are also moral foundations that liberals tend to score high on. Politeness aspect seems to correlate to respect for authority and respect for rights which conservatives care more about than liberals, however, libertarians tend to care more about respect for rights rather than respect for authority.
The reverse of assertiveness aspect of trait Extraversion submissiveness is hypothesized to correlate with conservative valuation of respect for authority.
The withdrawal aspect of trait Neuroticism is correlated with Individualism over collectivism and autonomy. These are valued more by libertarians than liberals
Taking the dichotomies or moral foundations theory and looking at the aspects of the BFAS, the table below allows for the inference that moral foundations operate on personality dimensions.
Openness Conscientiousness Agreeableness Extraversion Neuroticism
Intellect Openness Industriousness Orderliness Compassion Politeness Enthusiasm Assertiveness vs.
Submissiveness Withdrawal Volatility
Reason over Emotion Disgust Kindness, Respect for authority Respect for Authority Individualism over collectivism
Tradition Nurturing Respect for others’ rights Autonomy
Hierarchy Self-Sacrifice
Proportionality Gentleness
In-Group Loyalty
Table 1. Moral Foundations and their Temperamental Matches.
Now one may ask, why include the political affiliation? Well, it is known in psychology that temperament does influence voter behavior and Haidt seems to have shown that morality also plays a role. Therefore morality must be related to temperament in some sense. By doing a correlational analysis of the moral foundations and how they relate to personality with the BFAS, it does not seem to be a stretch to infer that personality and morality are closely related.
Other questions to now consider are: Is this a case for objective morality, especially that we can objectively measure personality traits? Well, there seems to be room for further research into this. Does this answer the question of can atheists be moral?
Morality seems to not only to be taught from the social substrate (from in-group morality that establishes social norms that includes one’s parents, siblings, peers, religious community, etc.) but also influenced by one’s own temperamental modes of being.
References
DeYoung, C. G., Quilty, L. C., & Peterson, J. B. (2007). Between facets and domains: 10 aspects of the big five. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 93(5), 880-896. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.93.5.880.
Graham, J., Haidt, J., & Nosek, B. A. (2009). Liberals and conservatives rely on different sets of moral foundations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 96(5), 1029-1046. doi:10.1037/a0015141.
Haidt, J. (2012). The righteous mind: Why good people are divided by politics and religion. Pantheon Books.
Iyer R, Koleva S, Graham J, Ditto P, & Haidt J. (2012). Understanding Libertarian Morality: The Psychological Dispositions of Self-Identified Libertarians. PLOS ONE 7(8): doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0042366.