| Political divisions often reflect moral divisions, and moral divisions are particularly difficult to mend. Two studies were conducted to explore how Moral Foundations Theory, a taxonomy of universal moral concerns, and framing, a tactic widely employed in political communication and persuasion, could be combined to create more appealing moral arguments. MFT proposes five foundations of morality: Harm, Fairness, Ingroup, Authority, and Purity. Past research has shown that liberals care principally about harm and fairness, while conservatives rely more equally on all five when making moral judgments. Arguments on both sides of the death penalty and same-sex marriage were framed to appeal to each of the foundations and presented to participants recruited using the web site yourmorals.org. Structural equation modeling and multiple regression techniques were used to test five predictions: (1) Individuals would prefer arguments that spoke in terms of their valued foundations, (2) individuals would prefer arguments that supported their existing attitude, and (3) whether the arguments were attitude-consistent or not would determine the degree to which their valued foundations played a role in determining judgments, (4) evaluators would prefer people who argued in terms of evaluators' valued foundations, and (5) evaluators would prefer people who shared their existing attitude. Mixed support was found for the first, third, fourth, and fifth hypotheses; strong support was found for the second hypothesis. The implications of this work for MFT and its applicability to real world persuasion are discussed. |
