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The Endorsement of the Moral Foundations in Food-Related Moral Thinking in Three European Countries

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Abstract

Food has become a prominent object of everyday moral discussions. This study examines how gender, political orientation, and country of origin are connected to moral foundation endorsement in food-related moral thinking. Respondents were university students (N = 371) from Finland, Denmark, and Italy who completed a word association task, in that given stimulus words were “ethical food” and “unethical food.” Results showed a presence of five moral foundations in the data, and indicated high prevalence of the Purity/Sanctity foundation in food-related moral thinking. As expected, gender differences emerged in the endorsement of the Fairness/Reciprocity and the Purity/Sanctity foundations. Also, between-country differences emerged in four of the five moral foundations, indicating that even within Europe countries may differ from each other in their endorsement of foundations. The results also verified the previously found effect of political orientation in three of the five moral foundations, although the study used a completely new and different type of method compared with previous studies. The study concludes by proposing more cross-national comparative studies where the focus is on the specific objects of moral thinking.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers of an earlier version of this paper for their helpful comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Social Research, Social Psychology, University of Helsinki, Unioninkatu 37, P.O. Box 54, 00014, Helsinki, Finland

    Jaana-Piia Mäkiniemi & Anna-Maija Pirttilä-Backman

  2. University of Milano-Bicocca (Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca), Piazza dell’Ateneo Nuovo 1, 20126, Milan, Italy

    Michelle Pieri

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  1. Jaana-Piia Mäkiniemi
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  2. Anna-Maija Pirttilä-Backman
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Correspondence to Jaana-Piia Mäkiniemi.

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Mäkiniemi, JP., Pirttilä-Backman, AM. & Pieri, M. The Endorsement of the Moral Foundations in Food-Related Moral Thinking in Three European Countries. J Agric Environ Ethics 26, 771–786 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10806-012-9401-3

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