Browsing by Author "Granroth, Simon Edvin Gunnar"

The Moral Foundations Theory strives to explain human morality and political differences on the individual and the group level. According to the theory there are five core moral foundations that humans intuitively rely on in the process of moralising. There has been research into how the moral foundations profile with regards to political identities. Here liberals and conservatives tend to rely on different foundational values when moralising. However, there is no previous research on how the Moral Foundations Theory and political identity works in military samples. Researching this facet of values in the military has an inherent value for military education but also in exploring how the MFT replicates in military populations. This study uses data from a survey (N = 167) among military cadettes at the Finnish National Defence University to compare the results from the Moral Foundations Questionnaire with political identification measured on a two-dimensional self-placement instrument. A two-step cluster analysis on the MFT material identified four distinct clusters of moral profiles within the sample. Variance analysis on the clusters using the political self-placement measure confirmed that the liberal and the libertarian clusters hold significantly more liberal values than the two conservative clusters, the loyal-conservative and the authoritarian-conservative, on the social political measure. The sample data suggests that loyalty and authority are the most important values for this population while harm, sanctity and fairness score lower and display a greater degree of variation between the clusters. It appears that the MFT does not replicate fully in the FNDU sample. The clusters are loosely identifiable as previous research would suggest, but they display significant anomalies in the form of exceptionally high loyalty and authority, which is unique in any WEIRD population. The skewed gender representation (93.4 % men) of the sample, the translated MFQ and the NDU context are probable contributing factors to this phenomenon. However, the political self-placement measure replicated as expected on social values with regards to the MFT profiles even if the differences were small.