Skip to content

Instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

@randomvariable

randomvariable/MFT-covid.md

Last active June 27, 2026 10:21
Show Gist options

  • Select an option

    Learn more about clone URLs
  • Save randomvariable/11d049f4acdbd43c9e4423973dfbc113 to your computer and use it in GitHub Desktop.

Select an option

Learn more about clone URLs
Save randomvariable/11d049f4acdbd43c9e4423973dfbc113 to your computer and use it in GitHub Desktop.
Download ZIP
Did the Moral Foundations Theory Group Publish a Post-COVID Retrospective on the Purity Foundation? A Slop Report
Raw
MFT-covid.md

Did the Moral Foundations Theory Group Publish a Post-COVID Retrospective on the Purity Foundation? A Slop Report

TL;DR

  • No. The original Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) authors—Jonathan Haidt and Jesse Graham—have not published a formal scholarly retrospective or reassessment of the Purity/Sanctity foundation in light of COVID-19. The closest thing on record is an informal, unpublished remark by Haidt in a 2024 Conversations with Tyler interview, where—asked directly whether COVID changed his view—he argued the pandemic "wasn't about germs" but about government control, so it neither cleanly validated nor revised his purity work.
  • The MFT group did publish a major theory revision in this window—Atari, Haidt, Graham et al. (2023), "Morality Beyond the WEIRD," JPSP (the MFQ-2, which splits Fairness into Equality and Proportionality)—but it is a cross-cultural measurement overhaul built on 25 populations, not a COVID/purity retrospective. The Liberty/Oppression foundation was added earlier (Haidt, The Righteous Mind, 2012).
  • The richest COVID-era purity scholarship comes from third parties (and from MFT-adjacent collaborators like Mohammad Atari and a Jesse Graham–co-authored vaccination paper), not from a Haidt/Graham retrospective. A separate group (Kurt Gray et al., 2022/2023) published a high-profile critique arguing purity is not a coherent construct at all.

Key Findings

  1. No formal MFT-author retrospective on purity + COVID exists. Searches of moralfoundations.org publications, Haidt's After Babel Substack, and the academic literature turned up no paper, blog post, or essay by Haidt or Graham specifically reassessing the Purity foundation because of the pandemic.

  2. Haidt's only substantive on-record COVID/purity comment is informal and somewhat deflationary. In Conversations with Tyler Ep. 209 (published April 3, 2024; recorded February 14, 2024), Tyler Cowen asked the question directly: "Given our experience with COVID, where the people on the left seem to be obsessed with masks and with social distancing, do you still think of right wingers as the purity party, as some of your earlier work suggested?" Haidt's reply reframed COVID as a trust/authority and political-identity phenomenon rather than a purity-foundation phenomenon: "What happened with COVID was that it wasn't about germs. I think it was about government control versus not." He did not claim the pandemic validated, revised, or refuted his purity research.

  3. The big theory revision of this era is MFT 2.0 / MFQ-2 — unrelated to COVID. Atari, Haidt, Graham, Koleva, Stevens & Dehghani (2023), "Morality Beyond the WEIRD," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 125(5), 1157–1188, splits Fairness into Equality and Proportionality (yielding six foundations: Care, Equality, Proportionality, Loyalty, Authority, Purity) and rebuilds the questionnaire on data from 25 populations across three studies (Study 1: N=3,360, five populations; Study 2: N=3,902, 19 populations; Study 3: N=1,410, three populations). Purity was retained unchanged. Atari & Haidt (2023) separately floated Ownership as a candidate new foundation.

  4. A pointed external critique of the purity construct appeared in 2022–23. Gray, DiMaggio, Schein & Kachanoff (2023), "The Problem of Purity in Moral Psychology," Personality and Social Psychology Review, 27(3):272–308, argues: "we reveal ~9 understandings of purity, ranging from respecting God to not eating gross things… Because purity is not a coherent construct, it cannot be a distinct basis of moral judgment or specially tied to disgust." The dispute continued in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (2023), where Gray, DiMaggio and colleagues published rejoinders ("Purity is still a problem"; the companion BBS commentary "Purity is not a distinct moral domain") and the MFT side (Graham, Atari, Dehghani & Haidt) defended pluralism in a commentary whose theme was that "puritanism needs purity, and moral psychology needs pluralism."

  5. A large third-party COVID literature applied the purity construct, robustly linking purity/sanctity endorsement and disgust sensitivity to vaccine hesitancy and pandemic behavior. Notably, Reimer, Atari, Karimi-Malekabadi, Trager, Kennedy, Graham & Dehghani (2022, American Psychologist) includes Jesse Graham as a co-author and finds moral values "are associated with COVID-19 vaccination rates across 3,106 counties in the contiguous United States," with high-hesitancy participants "twice as likely to strongly emphasize Purity (and Liberty)." This is the closest thing to original-author engagement with COVID and purity—though it is an empirical applied study, not a retrospective.

  6. The "conservatism-disgust paradox" is a real puzzle that the original authors did not resolve in print. Because the Purity foundation is theorized as a pathogen-avoidance/disgust system stronger in conservatives, the fact that liberals drove masking/distancing compliance looks paradoxical. The papers grappling with this (Ruisch et al., 2022; Samore et al., 2021; Vartanova et al., 2021) are all by third parties, not Haidt/Graham.

Details

(a) Retrospectives by the original MFT authors themselves

The anniversary / "decade later" reflections that DO exist are about theory structure and measurement, not COVID or purity specifically:

  • Graham, Haidt, Koleva, Motyl, Iyer, Wojcik & Ditto (2013), "Moral Foundations Theory: The Pragmatic Validity of Moral Pluralism," Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 47, 55–130 — the canonical consolidation/retrospective of the first decade. Pre-COVID.
  • Graham, Haidt, Motyl, Meindl, Iskiwitch & Mooijman (2019), "Moral Foundations Theory: On the Advantages of Moral Pluralism over Moral Monism," in Atlas of Moral Psychology — a defense/retrospective. Pre-COVID.
  • Atari, Haidt, Graham, Koleva, Stevens & Dehghani (2023), "Morality Beyond the WEIRD," JPSP 125(5):1157–1188 — the MFT 2.0 paper introducing the MFQ-2. Fairness is split into Equality and Proportionality; the other four foundations (Care, Loyalty, Authority, Purity) are retained. The paper also reports that the individualizing/binding higher-order structure may be WEIRD-specific. No COVID framing. Zakharin & Bates (2023, Personality and Individual Differences) independently validated the MFQ-2's six-factor structure.
  • Liberty/Oppression was added by Haidt in The Righteous Mind (2012), chapter 8 — well before COVID — in response to libertarians, shifting Fairness toward proportionality. Critics (e.g., Suhler & Churchland, 2011) treat such additions as evidence the theory is more taxonomy than predictive theory.

Haidt's COVID/purity commentary (informal):

  • Conversations with Tyler Ep. 209 (April 3, 2024): the "it wasn't about germs… it was about government control" framing quoted above. Haidt also notes "on the far left, there has always been an extreme purity contingent, like the yoga people who believe in… toxins," acknowledging left-coded purity — but this is consistent with his long-standing pre-COVID position, not a revision.
  • Earlier pandemic-era commentary from Haidt (e.g., TIME, March 2020, "The Moral Dilemma of Coronavirus Quarantines"; the Prof G podcast, 2020) discusses cooperation, scarcity, and disgust-as-disease-avoidance in general terms but is not a purity-foundation reassessment.

Graham specifically: No direct public statement by Jesse Graham addressing the COVID masking/hygiene "purity reversal" was located across his publications, moralfoundations.org, and interviews. (On the Opinion Science podcast he discusses purity and anti-vaccine attitudes on "both the extreme right and… extreme left," but in reference to HPV-vaccine work, not COVID.) Caution: several COVID papers cite "Graham et al. 2020" on social-distancing defiance — that is Amanda Graham, a criminologist (Socius, 2020), not Jesse Graham. Do not conflate them.

(b) Third-party research applying the purity construct to COVID

  • Reimer, Atari, Karimi-Malekabadi, Trager, Kennedy, Graham & Dehghani (2022), "Moral Values Predict County-Level COVID-19 Vaccination Rates in the United States," American Psychologist, 77(6):743–759. Purity was the strongest moral predictor of lower vaccination (co-author Reimer: "the biggest of which was a desire for bodily and spiritual purity"). Includes Jesse Graham as co-author. The single closest item to original-author COVID-purity engagement.
  • Amin, Bednarczyk, Ray, Melchiori, Graham, Huntsinger & Omer (2017), Nature Human Behaviour — pre-COVID foundational link between purity/harm and vaccine hesitancy, heavily cited in COVID work.
  • Vartanova, Eriksson, Kirgil & Strimling (2021), "The Advent of the COVID-19 Epidemic Did Not Affect Americans' Endorsement of Moral Foundations," Frontiers in Psychology, 12:647858. Longitudinal study of 237 American participants: "We did not find evidence of any systematic change in the endorsement of any moral foundation, neither in general nor specifically among liberals or specifically among those who perceived the greatest threat from COVID-19." Authors are Sweden-based researchers — NOT Haidt or Graham.
  • Ruisch, Boggs, Moore, Granados Samayoa, Ladanyi, Steinert & Fazio (2022), "Investigating the conservatism-disgust paradox in reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic," PLOS ONE 17(11):e0275440. Argues the paradox is partly a self-report artifact; using non-self-report measures, disgust sensitivity predicts disease avoidance more weakly, dissolving much of the apparent contradiction.
  • Samore et al. (2021), "Of pathogens and party lines," PLOS ONE 16(6):e0253326; Díaz & Cova (2021, France) found authority/purity associated with increased prevention, while several US studies found binding foundations associated with fewer prevention behaviors — i.e., context-dependent and sometimes contradictory results.
  • Behavioral immune system literature: Shook et al. (2020, PLOS ONE), Makhanova & Shepherd (2020), and others tie germ aversion/pathogen disgust to COVID concern and preventive behavior. This draws on Schaller & Park's BIS framework, which is theoretically adjacent to—but not identical with—MFT's purity foundation.
  • "It's Time to Be Disgusting About COVID-19" (2022) — disgust-priming increased public-health compliance more among conservatives, including vaccination willingness among unvaccinated conservatives.

(c) Purity in Haidt's recent (non-MFT) work

The Coddling of the American Mind (Lukianoff & Haidt, 2018) frames campus "safetyism" as treating safety as a "sacred value" — a purity/sanctity-flavored analysis applied to the political left — but Haidt does not explicitly label it as the purity foundation, and it predates COVID. The Anxious Generation (2024) does not center the purity construct.

Recommendations

  1. If you need an original-author "retrospective," cite Atari/Haidt/Graham et al. (2023) "Morality Beyond the WEIRD" (MFQ-2) as the formal theory revision, and the Haidt Conversations with Tyler (2024) interview as his only on-record COVID/purity reflection — but be explicit that neither is a purity-and-pandemic retrospective. Do not attribute a COVID purity reassessment to Haidt or Graham; none exists in published form.
  2. For the COVID-purity empirical link, lead with Reimer/Atari/Graham et al. (2022, American Psychologist) — peer-reviewed, US-county-scale (3,106 counties), and carrying a genuine MFT author (Graham), it is the strongest bridge between the original group and COVID.
  3. Present the "conservatism-disgust paradox" honestly as unresolved by the originators. Pair the Haidt interview (purity reframed as authority/trust) with Ruisch et al. (2022) and the null-result Vartanova et al. (2021) to show the field's ambivalence.
  4. Flag the Gray et al. (2022/2023) critique and the Graham/Haidt rebuttal so the reader sees the live scholarly dispute over whether "purity" is even a valid distinct construct — directly relevant to anyone weighing how much explanatory weight purity should bear.
  5. Benchmark that would change this assessment: If Haidt or Graham publish an After Babel essay or journal article explicitly revisiting purity through the lens of COVID, or if a future MFQ-2 paper adds a pandemic analysis, upgrade from "no retrospective exists" to citing it directly.

Caveats

  • Absence of evidence, not evidence of absence. I cannot prove Haidt or Graham never made a relevant remark (e.g., on X/Twitter or in an unindexed podcast). The finding is "no formal/published retrospective located" — a strong but not absolute claim.
  • The Amanda Graham vs. Jesse Graham citation trap is real — verify any "Graham 2020" COVID citation before attributing it to the MFT originator.
  • Behavioral-immune-system work and MFT's purity foundation are related but theoretically distinct; some sources blur them, and the user should keep the constructs separate.
  • The COVID-MFT empirical record is genuinely mixed — effect directions for binding foundations and purity differ across countries (US vs. France) and across self-report vs. behavioral measures. Treat any single reported effect cautiously.
  • Haidt's 2024 interview remark is informal, delivered in conversation, not a considered scholarly position; it should be quoted as such rather than presented as a formal revision of MFT.
Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment