Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Moral judgments are known to change in response tochanges in external conditions. But how variable aremoral judgments over time in the absence of environ-mental variation? The moral domain has been describedin terms of five moral foundations, categories that ap-pear to capture moral judgment across cultures. We ex-amined the temporal consistency of repeated responsesto the moral foundations questionnaire over short timeperiods, fitted a set of mixed effects models to the dataand compared them. We found correlations betweenchanges in participant responses for different founda-tions over time, suggesting a structure with at leasttwo underlying stochastic processes: one for moral judg-ments involving harm and fairness, and another formoral judgments related to loyalty, authority, and pu-rity.