Decomposing the Moral Structure of Attitudes Towards Foreign Policy and International Affairs

Substantial research suggests that humans are fundamentally morally attuned beings, with such moral roots deriving either from evolutionary or socialising processes. Recent research shows that most studies overlook the fact that moral psychology theoretical frameworks might be tapping similar underlying moral constructs. In fact, the aspects of how politics and morality are associated can be analysed according to four prominent theories, couched on sociological, linguistic, and psychological traditions. Recent work using a nationally representative American sample uncovered a three-factor structure (Order, Other-Focus, and Self-Focus) crosscutting the four theoretical traditions mentioned earlier. The results showed that morality explained 30% of the variance in political orientation (excluded extreme cases), whereas other covariates (e.g., age, gender, ethnicity, education, income, and religion) accounted for 21% of the variance. These findings suggest that using moral constructs deriving from several theories might better capture variation in political processes, and that moral values predict left-right ideology self-placement better than demographic covariates. In this paper, across three studies and using a large sample (Ntotal = 1066), we employ original methodological and analytical techniques to offer a robust, systematic, and nuanced exploration of the basic moral correlates of American attitudes towards foreign policy and international affairs. We adopt the three-factor basic structure of morality, and test how these are associated with general postures towards international affairs (e.g., isolationism) and specific foreign policy issues (e.g., engagement with the United Nations). Pilot Study and Study 1 establish patterns of moral macro-factors associations with attitudes towards international affairs. In Study 2, we replicate and generalise the findings of previous studies, extend them to the foreign policy issues, and test whether and how moral value’s effects on foreign policy attitudes are channelled through general postures. To reduce the variance in our findings, we present our results using a meta-analytic synthesis. Our studies have three overarching contributions to the study of the micro-foundations of international relations. We first replicate the three-factor structure and establish which theory-specific moral constructs are unique in the associations between morality macro-factors and international issues. Next, we explore the role of different moral values in accounting for attitudes towards foreign policy and international affairs. Last, we connect the macro and micro levels of analysis by testing which are the specific and more basic elements within each of the four morality traditions that account the most for each of the views of world. More importantly, we contend and provide evidence that multiple moral values are at the micro-foundations of national interest interpretations. Studying the underlying psychological mechanisms of their moral values offers an innovative angle to understand how individuals think about the world, how they frame their interests about the international, and more broadly, allow us a window to predict how public opinion will behave and frame states’ behaviour and future of international politics.