Mgmt 302

The Moral Foundations Self-Assessment Exercise
Part 1 Everybody has his/her core values. These core values may develop or change gradually over a lifetime but in most cases they are stable and enduring. I think one of the most important values that help me navigate through daily experiences and life as a whole is fairness. I think I inherited the value from my mother. She always reminds me to treat everybody fairly. I don’t think I can discriminate anybody because of his background, such as belief, class, and poverty. As I grow up, I find that fairness can make life harmonious. Treating friends fairly prevent them from envying each other. Treating group members fairly can make the group work go well. It also helps members well collaborate with each other and work hard because it makes them equally important to the group. Another core value to me is loyalty. When I read something about war, I’m often moved by the soldiers’ loyalty to their nations. I think a person should be loyal to his/her nation, party, or group. Loyalty is the base for people who live in a community. If a person often betrays his group, he cannot be believed by others. Nobody tells him the truths. Nobody wants to work with him. Then he cannot live in the group. The last core value to me is honesty. When I was young, my teachers and parents told me to be honest. I think honesty is the most basic values for human. In a group of people, a member once cheated, others will no longer totally believe in him/her in the future. That person will be isolated and then abandoned by the group. It’s bad for both the particular person and the entire group.
Part 2
The scale you completed was the "Moral Foundations Questionnaire," developed by Jesse Graham and Jonathan Haidt at the University of Virginia.

The scale is a measure of your reliance on and endorsement of five psychological foundations of morality that seem to be found across cultures. Each of the two parts of the scale contained three questions related to each foundation: 1) harm/care, 2) fairness/reciprocity (including issues of rights), 3) ingroup/loyalty, 4) authority/respect, and 5) purity/sanctity.

The idea behind the scale is that human morality is the result of biological and cultural evolutionary processes that made human beings very sensitive to many different (and often competing) issues. Some of these issues are about treating other individuals well (the first two foundations - harm and fairness). Other issues are about how to be a good member of a group or supporter of social order and tradition (the last three foundations). Haidt and Graham have found that political liberals generally place a higher value on the first two foundations; they are very concerned about issues of harm and fairness (including issues of inequality and exploitation). Political conservatives care about harm and fairness too, but they generally score slightly lower on those scale items. The big difference between liberals and conservatives seems to be that conservatives score slightly higher on the ingroup/loyalty foundation, and much higher on the authority/respect and purity/sanctity foundations.
This difference seems to explain many of the most contentious issues in the culture war. For example, liberals support legalizing gay marriage (to be fair and compassionate), whereas many conservatives are reluctant to change the nature of marriage and the family, basic building blocks of society. Conservatives are more likely to favor practices that increase order and respect (e.g., spanking, mandatory pledge of allegiance), whereas liberals often oppose these practices as being violent or coercive.
In the graph below, your scores on each foundation are shown in green (the 1st bar in each set of 3 bars). The scores of all liberals who have taken it on our site are shown in blue (the 2nd bar), and the scores of all conservatives are shown in red (3rd bar). Scores run from 0 (the lowest possible score, you completely reject that foundation) to 5 (the highest possible score, you very strongly endorse that foundation and build much of your morality on top of it).
You are a member of the group OB-Spring-2012 and those results are shown with the Grey bar.

Part 3
After doing the questionnaire and reading the assessment, I think the assessment feedback provides an accurate profile of my moral values. Based on the assessment, the sense of fairness, loyalty and purity is comparatively high in my mind. It’s the same with my self-assessment. In addition, from the assessment, I found that I didn’t regard authority as an important moral foundation. It’s beyond my self-assessment.
I think feedback reinforce about your previous concept of my own personal values, such as loyalty and fairness. However, it also indicates about some personal values that I had not considered previously. Haidt and Graham, the developers of the research, have found that political liberals generally place a higher value on the first two foundations; they are very concerned about issues of harm and fairness (including issues of inequality and exploitation). Political conservatives care about harm and fairness too, but they generally score slightly lower on those scale items. The big difference between liberals and conservatives seems to be that conservatives score slightly higher on the in-group/loyalty foundation, and much higher on the authority/respect and purity/sanctity foundations. I place higher value on fairness, loyalty and purity. So I think I have a combined characteristic of political liberals and conservatives. In other words, I’m stand in the middle.
 I think the exercise is a worthwhile investment of your time. It helps me reinforce the personal values I knew before, and find some unknown personal values I didn’t realize before. I think the questionnaire is good. When people do that in the future, they just have to answer the questions with instinct instead of considering for a long time.