●In a previous study, we used the Moral Foundations Theory approach (described in Graham, et al., 2011) to examine the moral differences between Christians, and how they compare themselves to ‘typical Christians.” ●Moral Foundations Theory has five categories for psychological foundations on which the participants rated themselves as well as the other groups. These foundations are harm/care, fairness/reciprocity (referred to as the two “individualizing” foundations), ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity (referred to as “binding” foundations). ●It was found that Christians’ self-ratings of their morals were consistently lower (on all moral domains) than their perceptions of “typical Christian” morals (Clark & Terrell, unpublished manuscript). The current study was a follow-up conducted to explore why. ●It was expected that participants’ views of “typical Christian” morals were disproportionately higher than views of typical members of their own group or congregation. ●The participants were asked to list what specific religious affiliation that they would classify themselves under. The participants were asked later how they would compare themselves to the “typical [my group]”, where [my group] was their self-reported identification. To test Hypothesis 1, we performed separate paired t-tests for each Moral Foundation comparing individuals’ “self” MFQ with their “typical Christian” MFQ scores. Hypothesis 1 was supported, all t-tests showed significant differences (not shown) To test Hypothesis 2, we again performed t- tests comparing “self” MFQ this time with “typical [my group]” scores. We removed people who identified simply as “Christian,” since our hypothesis addressed those who identified with a specific group, not the broader category of “Christian;” this left N = 274. Hypothesis 2 was not supported (Table 1). Diverging Perceptions of Personal Moral Values and the Values of One's Religious Group Travis Clark & Heather Terrell Department of Psychology, University of North Dakota Introduction Conclusions Contact information ●The MFQ data supported that believers will consistently rate their morals lower than both the “typical Christians” and their own typical [my group] description. ●This outcome is perplexing, in that we have not found an answer as to why individuals rate their morals in this fashion. ●One answer could be that we did not give an example of what a “typical [my group]” would be defined as. So the percived “typical [my group]” could be seen as much more moral or pious. ●The small variety of religions could have also have had an effect on the results of the study ●Christians in this college sample were infrequent service attenders Travis Clark Results Hypotheses H1: Believers will consistently rate their own morals lower than “typical Christian” morals (replicating a previous study). H2: Believers will rate their own morals no differently than the morals of other members of their own group affiliation. Mean Difference tp Care score <.001 Fairness score <.001 Ingroup score <.001 Authority score <.001 Sanctity score <.001 Table 1 Methods Participants : Participants were 526 respondents (438 female) that completed an online survey. The final sample consisted of 447 classified as Christian or some subtype of Christian, 65 identified as atheist, agnostic, humanist, or other non-religious, and 6 identified as other religious. Procedure: Participants were asked to fill out demographics information, including their own religion and political information. Then they were given multiple versions of the Moral Foundations Questionnaire: “self”, “typical Christian”, and “typical [my group].” Moral Foundations Definitions Care – If a participant scores high on care, they are concerned with not intentionally harming others Fairness – If a participant scores high on fairness, they are concerned with fair exchanges Loyalty – If a participant scores high on loyalty, they are concerned loyalty to their group (family, country, etc.) Authority – If a participant scores high on authority, they are concerned with respect for authority and the idea of hierarchy Sanctity – If a participant scores high on sanctity, they are concerned with moral virtue, sexual purity, and religious purity (Graham et al., 2013) References Clark, T., & Terrell, H. (unpublished manuscript). Do perceived moral differences align with actual moral differences between religious individuals and fellow members of their identification. Graham, J., Nosek, B. A., Haidt, J., Iyer, R., Koleva, S., & Ditto, P. H. (2011). Mapping the moral domain. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,101(2), Graham, J., Haidt, J., Koleva, S., Motyl, M., Iyer, R., Wojcik, S., & Ditto, P. H. (2013). Moral foundations theory: The pragmatic validity of moral pluralism.Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 47, Figure 1