Testing Measurement Invariance of the Moral Foundations Questionnaire Across 27 Countries

Abstract

It has become clear that there are multiple "moralities": diverse bases that guide people's judgments of right and wrong. The widely known Moral Foundations Theory stipulates that there are at least five such moralities, measurable via questionnaire, and tends to assume that these distinct foundations are rooted deep in humanity's evolutionary past. Were this true, we should find that the structure of five foundations is cross-culturally generalizable. Such assumptions are best tested in a diverse range of global populations with no built-in Western bias. Here, we test the measurement invariance of the short-form Moral Foundations Questionnaire across 27 countries spanning the five largest continents. We find that it is difficult to specify Moral Foundations Questionnaire items in a quantitative five-factor model that will converge nonproblematically across a wide variety of populations.