MORAL FOUNDATIONS DICTIONARY 2.0 (FREE)

Description – Moral Foundation Theory is a psychological framework developed by Jonathan Haidt that suggests human morality is shaped by innate moral foundations: Care/Harm, Fairness/Cheating, Loyalty/Betrayal, Authority/Subversion, Sanctity/Degradation, and Liberty/Oppression. These foundations serve as the building blocks of our moral judgments and vary across cultures.

The Moral Foundations Dictionary (MFD) was developed by a team of researchers led by Jonathan Haidt and Jesse Graham as part of their work on moral psychology and cultural variation in morality.  WordStat provides the current version 2.0 of this dictionary which consists of more than 200 words per foundation. The MFD provides a list of words and phrases associated with five of the six moral foundations (the Liberty/Oppression foundation was added more recently), allowing researchers to analyze texts and language data to measure the prevalence and salience of different moral dimensions. It has been used in various studies to understand cultural differences in moral values, political ideologies, and the language used in moral discourse.

The author’s goal in creating MFD 2.0 was to expand earlier versions of the dictionary that averaged about 32 words per foundation and to test the validity of the larger dictionaries. In the next version they developed about 210 words per foundation. As a means of validation, the authors recruited more than 1,000 people to write essays on one of the 10 moral foundations. They came from 58 countries. They wrote essays about 100 words long based on series of questions. By using LIWC they estimated the density of words from each of the 10 foundations in each essay and compared them to the density in other foundations. The analysis showed the new dictionaries had a higher average validity than the previous ones.

Download WordStat Versions of the Moral Foundations Dictionary

Click here to download the dictionary

Installation Instruction

Extract the content of the zip file into the WordStat Dictionary folder (by default:Documents\My Provalis Research Projects\Dictionaries) or a folder of your choice.

To obtain information on WordStat content analysis software or download a trial version, click here.

Main reference (to be cited in all publications which make use of it)

Frimer, J. A., Boghrati, R., Haidt, J., Graham, J., & Dehgani, M. (2019). Moral Foundations Dictionary for Linguistic Analyses 2.0. Unpublished manuscript.

Other relevant reference:

Haidt, J. (2012). The righteous mind: Why good people are divided by politics and religion. Vintage.