Abstract
In this exploratory paper, we investigate the extension of Haidt’s (Psychol Rev 108(4):814–834, 2001, The righteous mind: Why good people are divided by politics and religion, 2012) Moral foundations theory (MFT), operationalized as the MFQ30 questionnaire, from a sample of the general public across many countries to a sample of business students. MFT posits that people rely on five major concerns, or foundations, when making moral judgments. The five concerns are care/harm, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, respect/authority, and purity/degradation. In addition, Haidt suggests that intuition, rather than reasoning, leads to moral judgment. We replicate Haidt’s measurement model and find that the measurement model based on our sample is consistent. This indicates support for MFT. Further, we find structural differences in the measurement model between the genders and between areas of study. Our findings suggest that all students in the sample focus substantially on the fairness foundation. Ethics education and research may seek to expand the number of moral foundations individuals consider when discerning whether something is right or wrong.
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Notes
The sample without MAcc Program participants is 68.1 % male, which is higher than research released by AACSB (Lavelle 2013). They find that undergraduate business programs under the leadership of a male dean have male enrollment of 57.8 %. However, the school we sampled from has undergraduate male enrollment of 65.1 %. Our sample is significantly different from the findings of AACSB (p value = 0.0075). However, our sample is not significantly different from the school’s college of business percentage of males (p value = 0.801). Therefore the sample is representative of the school where the survey was conducted.
Partial structural invariance is also reached upon elimination of the constraints on the error variances associated with the indicator variables F2, F4, L2, L3, and R1.
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We thank David Herda, workshop participants at North Dakota State University, and participants at The Twentieth Annual International Vincentian Business Ethics Conference.
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Andersen, M.L., Zuber, J.M. & Hill, B.D. Moral Foundations Theory: An Exploratory Study with Accounting and Other Business Students. J Bus Ethics 132, 525–538 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-014-2362-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-014-2362-x