Clifford Scott, Iyengar Vijeth, Cabeza Roberto, Sinnott-Armstrong Walter
Department of Political Science, University of Houston, 447 Philip Guthrie Hoffman Hall, Houston, TX, 77204, USA.
Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA.
Behav Res Methods. 2015 Dec;47(4):1178-1198. doi: 10.3758/s13428-014-0551-2.
Research on the emotional, cognitive, and social determinants of moral judgment has surged in recent years. The development of moral foundations theory (MFT) has played an important role, demonstrating the breadth of morality. Moral psychology has responded by investigating how different domains of moral judgment are shaped by a variety of psychological factors. Yet, the discipline lacks a validated set of moral violations that span the moral domain, creating a barrier to investigating influences on judgment and how their neural bases might vary across the moral domain. In this paper, we aim to fill this gap by developing and validating a large set of moral foundations vignettes (MFVs). Each vignette depicts a behavior violating a particular moral foundation and not others. The vignettes are controlled on many dimensions including syntactic structure and complexity making them suitable for neuroimaging research. We demonstrate the validity of our vignettes by examining respondents' classifications of moral violations, conducting exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis, and demonstrating the correspondence between the extracted factors and existing measures of the moral foundations. We expect that the MFVs will be beneficial for a wide variety of behavioral and neuroimaging investigations of moral cognition.
近年来，关于道德判断的情感、认知和社会决定因素的研究激增。道德基础理论（MFT）的发展发挥了重要作用，展示了道德的广度。道德心理学通过研究不同领域的道德判断如何受到各种心理因素的影响来做出回应。然而，该学科缺乏一套经过验证的跨越道德领域的道德违规行为，这为研究对判断的影响以及它们的神经基础在道德领域可能如何变化造成了障碍。在本文中，我们旨在通过开发和验证一大组道德基础短文（MFV）来填补这一空白。每个短文都描述了一种违反特定道德基础而不违反其他道德基础的行为。这些短文在包括句法结构和复杂性在内的许多维度上受到控制，使其适合神经成像研究。我们通过检查受访者对道德违规行为的分类、进行探索性和验证性因素分析以及证明提取的因素与现有的道德基础测量之间的对应关系，来证明我们短文的有效性。我们预计，MFV将有利于对道德认知进行广泛的行为和神经成像研究。
