Validation Study: Morality as Cooperation—Deviance Relevance Scale (MaC-DRS)

Morality is at the core of pro-sociality. It suppresses and regulates selfish tendencies and makes humans a social being. Even though morality is universal to humans, recent findings point to likely variability in moral domain endorsement across cultures. However, empirical cross-cultural endeavors into morality are still complicated due to missing reliable instruments to assess the subjective relevance of moral domains. To address this research-gap we developed a new self-report instrument that we call Morality as Cooperation—Deviance Relevance Scale (MaC-DRS). We designed this scale to capture moral deviance relevance and based it upon a theoretical combination and a partial extension of Moral Foundations Theory and Morality as Cooperation Theory. Concerning the outline of this research plan first and foremost an overarching research project will be introduced, then theoretical deliberations on morality will be shared before the construction process of MaC-DRS is described. Following this, a pilot study will be described (German student sample; N = 792) and first empirical results of the psychometric properties of MaC-DRS are presented and discussed. Finally, a detailed plan for an upcoming MaC-DRS validation study will be outlined and hypotheses, sample criteria as well as overarching research goals will be shown. unknown other