A popular theory says our deepest moral instincts shape our politics. But what if we have it backwards, and our politics quietly shape what we call moral?
Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) is widely used as a causal explanation of ideology: it holds that political attitudes are downstream products of moral intuitions — gut reactions about care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and purity that supposedly come first and sort us into camps.
There is an equally plausible story running the other way: that moral judgments are driven by political beliefs. The catch is that almost all prior work simply assumed the causal direction rather than testing it. So the question stayed open — do moral intuitions drive politics, or does politics drive moral intuitions?
Across all three studies, the evidence was consistent: ideology predicts moral intuitions, not the reverse. Where you stand politically shapes which moral foundations you endorse — flipping the direction MFT had assumed.
political beliefs come first — morality follows
If ideology shapes moral intuitions, then MFT works better as a description of how we rationalize our politics than as an account of where politics comes from. People don't just hold political views — they reach for moral language to make those views feel like timeless rights and wrongs.
Hatemi, Peter K., Charles Crabtree, and Kevin B. Smith. “Ideology Justifies Morality: Political Beliefs Predict Moral Foundations.” American Journal of Political Science 63(4): 788–806, 2019.
read the paper →evidence from two panel studies and one nationally representative study · the diagrams summarize the documented causal direction; model estimates live in the paper