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LIT-496: Mapping morality with a compass: Testing the theory of ‘morality-as-cooperation’ with a new questionnaire

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Properties4
StatusProposed — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-412), from the PsyArXiv manuscript; worth reading as the programme's psychometric test and as the place its authors concede that purity items are rated morally relevant, which "appear[s] to contradict" the theory. Its seven-factor result is weaker than the abstract says. The items were written by the authors, three per domain, from the theory itself, and selected by fit within each domain. Seven factors then fit the Relevance items but not the Judgement items, and the combined seven-domain model is rejected (CFI .73), so the best model has fourteen correlated factors. No non-cooperative item is in the MAC-Q, so it cannot test whether morality is only about cooperation. It would be settled by an item pool written independently of the theory, with harm, purity and other non-cooperative content in it, factored blind, on data that can be shared.
Tagsmoral-psychology, social-science, psychometrics
Cited as “paper” byNOTE-412 — Curry, Jones Chesters & Van Lissa 2019, the MAC-Q
Cited as “source” byTHEORY-468 — Morality is the set of solutions to recurrent problems of cooperation, so each of the seven cooperation problems game theory identifies yields a moral domain valued in every culture, and behaviour unrelated to cooperation is morally neutral, THEORY-505 — Questionnaire items written for morality-as-cooperation's seven domains form seven factors when rated for relevance to moral decisions, in the UK, the US and Turkey, but not when rated as agreement with moral statements, and the two formats cannot be pooled into seven domains, THEORY-632 — Purity is moralized in self-report: in morality-as-cooperation's own questionnaire studies, purity items are rated about as morally relevant as loyalty and authority items, and harmless purity violations are condemned, so that theory's prediction that non-cooperative behaviour is morally neutral fails unless purity is itself cooperative

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Oliver Scott Curry, Matthew Jones Chesters, Caspar J. Van Lissa (2019), Journal of Research in Personality 78:106–124; preprint PsyArXiv 42vbn (2018) — DOI-10.1016/j.jrp.2018.10.008

Key takeaways

  • A seven-subscale questionnaire built from morality-as-cooperation’s domains recovers seven factors on its Relevance items in UK and US samples, where the MFQ does not recover its five.
  • It does not test whether anything outside cooperation is moralized: it has no such items, and the MFQ’s purity items, which are such items, are rated morally relevant.

Standing in the record

Filed on 2026-10-02 at the owner’s request, with the rest of the morality-as-cooperation programme (ADR-018). The sixty-society paper (LIT-047) cites this one in its Reply as the test of the seven-factor structure, and NOTE-034’s lineage paragraph names it.

NOTE-412 is the close reading of 2026-10-02, and it placed the work Proposed. It does not move LIT-047. NOTE-034 found that test weakly diagnostic because its codebook defined the behaviours in virtue terms and coded no comparison domain. The questionnaire repeats both features. Its items describe the seven behaviours in virtue terms (“acted heroically”, “showed love for their family”), and it contains no non-cooperative item. So the seven-factor structure shows that people distinguish seven kinds of cooperation, not that morality is confined to them.

Its MFQ studies do bear on the purity objection, and they bear against the theory as stated in LIT-503. Purity items are rated morally relevant at about the level of the loyalty and authority items. The authors concede that this “appear[s] to contradict MAC’s prediction”. They meet it by saying purity is not a coherent domain, and by proposing that sympathy and disgust may be proximate mechanisms serving several cooperation problems at once (manuscript p. 40 and endnote xv). Fitouchi, André and Baumard (LIT-101) give the record’s worked version of that reply. The Turkish validation (LIT-513) is the independent replication of the factor structure.

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