The Dutch moral foundations stimulus database: An adaptation and validation of moral vignettes and sociomoral images in a Dutch sample

Abstract

Moral judgments are shaped by socialization and cultural heritage. Understanding how moral considerations vary across the globe requires the systematic development of moral stimuli for use in different cultures and languages. Focusing on Dutch populations, we adapted and validated two recent instruments for examining moral judgments: (1) the Moral Foundations Vignettes (MFVs) and (2) the Socio-Moral Image Database (SMID). We translated all 120 MFVs from English into Dutch and selected 120 images from SMID that primarily display moral, immoral, or neutral content. A total of 586 crowd-workers from the Netherlands provided over 38,460 individual judgments for both stimuli sets on moral and affective dimensions. For both instruments, we find that moral judgments and relationships between the moral foundations and political orientation are similar to those reported in the US, Australia, and Brazil. We provide the validated MFV and SMID images, along with associated rating data, to enable a broader study of morality.

Keywords

• moral judgment
• vignettes
• images
• cross-cultural
• moral foundations theory