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Moral Psychology Paper

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Moral Psychology refers to the study of moral development that begins at birth. Moral development can be measured by the five moral foundations; Care/harm, Fairness (equality)/cheating, Liberty/oppression refers to bond with others, cherishing and protecting those sensitive to harm and experience negative emotions towards those who harm. Fairness / Cheating describes choosing a punishment based on shared laws, ingroup or loyalty / Betrayal refers to groups who join together who trust and defend each other. The fourth foundation is Authority and respect follows are hierarchy structure sometimes due to physical force and fear or out of respect. Sanctity/degradation or Purity / Sanctity is the fifth foundation is the level of disgust for things like food and …show more content…

Jonathan Haidt and Jesse Graham (2007) found a relationship between morality and political opinion libertarians often focuses on the first two foundations Harm / care and Fairness / Cheating whereas conservatives view all five as equal. An experiment run by Jesse Graham, Jonathan Haidt, and Brian A. Nosek (2009) supported this theory, however they found that the political opinion was more of a spectrum ranging from very liberal to very conservative. A paper by Nickolas Elmer examined how moral reasoning communicates a political position. A study looking, not only at how individuals choose to align themselves, but looking at how the individuals determined the rules (Elmer, 2003). Looking further into this pervious research Florian van Leeuwen, Justin H. Park (2009), conducted a study with 140 students in Netherlands using the moral foundations scale but changing the world danger scale to measure the political scale, in an attempt to identify if participants were likely to become conservative or liberal. It was discovered that there was a “conservative pattern” for order (Leeuwen & Park,

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