The Making of Moral Foundations Theory with Jesse Graham

The Moral Science Podcast

Dr. Jesse Graham is the George S Eccles chair in business ethics, and an associate professor of management at the University of Utah. He’s most known for his work with Jonathan Haidt in developing Moral Foundations Theory—a theory that basic moral foundations guide a wide-array of behaviors and ideological preferences, political ones. In this podcast, Jesse and I talk about his experience in developing the theory, what theoretical challenges it faces, and his work to apply MFT to behavioral nudging.

3:10- The Emotional Dog paper by Haidt

7:10- Joseph & Haidt 2004 paper

8:30- Paper on Libertarian foundations

10:00- Paper about criteria for foundations

13:00- Moral Foundations Questionnaire, scale development paper

14:50- Steven Pinker's New York Times Op-ed

16:00- Joshua Greene's 2001 "trolley-ology" paper

30:30- Morteza Dehghani researches use of foundation-language

34:40- Larry Nucci critiques MFT for its relativism

37:00- Martha Nussbaum's book critiquing disgust-based moral action

46:00- Example articles that call disgust "irrelevant" or suggest it taints judgments: Schnall et al., 2008; Zhong et al, 2010

CORRECTION: study of "illegitimate power distributions" was NOT based on MFT, as Amber had said.

50:00- Feinberg & Willer papers on nudging conservatives and liberals

53:30- John Jost critique of MFT legitimizing conservative foundations

55:50- Jesse's response normative MFT claims

1:00:00- Jesse's vaccine hesitancy paper