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Adolescent Ratings of Moral Violations Moderated by Gender and Political Identity

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Abstract

This brief report assessed adolescents’ (n = 1720, M = 13.87 years old, SD = 2.17) ratings of moral violations under a moral foundations theory (MFT) paradigm. Hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) was used to control for the nested nature of school groups and explore relationships between gender, political identity, and moral violation ratings. Participants came from schools in predominantly conservative communities in the USA, and results show interaction effects between gender and conservative political identity for the physical harm to animals, physical harm to humans, emotional harm to humans, justice, and sanctity violation ratings. These findings provide a possible starting point for future studies of how sociocultural factors, internalized gender stereotypes, and political identity might influence moral intuition development during adolescence.

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Data Availability

Data used in this study is freely available upon request from the author.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Texas at Tyler, Tyler, USA

    Brandon L. Bretl

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  1. Brandon L. Bretl
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Correspondence to Brandon L. Bretl.

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Informed Consent

Informed consent/assent was obtained from all research participants consistent with international codes of ethics and in compliance to IRB approved protocols. The protocol for this study was approved by the University of Kansas Institutional Review Board as STUDY00142366: “Character Foundations Survey (CFS) Reliability and Validation Study.

Conflict of Interest

The author declares no competing interests.

Appendix

Appendix

Table.6 Null model, variance explained by school (level 2) predictor
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Bretl, B.L. Adolescent Ratings of Moral Violations Moderated by Gender and Political Identity. Trends in Psychol. 30, 608–619 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s43076-021-00120-z

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