Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) posits that people moralize at least six distinct kinds of virtues. These virtues are divided into “individualizing” and “binding” virtues. Despite widespread enthusiasm for MFT, it is unknown how plausible it is as a model of people’s conceptualizations of the moral domain. In this research, we take a bottom-up approach to characterizing people’s conceptualization of the moral domain, and derive a taxonomy of morality that does not resemble MFT. We find that this model more accurately reflects people’s theories of morality than does MFT.