Moral Flocking: How Shared Moral Foundations Shape the Social Network among First-Semester University Students

Inferences about moral character are central to impression formation, yet how shared moral values relate to offline tie formation remains largely untested. In this preregistered, full-roster study of a German first-semester psychology cohort (N = 112 of 331, 33.84% coverage), we mapped the social ties the cohort formed. Moral foundation similarity was associated with tie formation and held across three further analyses, but the association was small and of the same magnitude as similarity in agreeableness, an established predictor of social ties. The preregistered models for foundation-specific homophily did not converge; in a reduced model, only Authority showed an effect, and the binding and individualizing foundations did not differ in average moral homophily. Centrality and brokerage were unrelated to students' moral foundation endorsements, whereas network communities differed in theirs. Moral homophily is thus detectable where offline networks first form; yet whether it organizes them needs denser, repeated observation.