The expanded Moral Foundations Vignettes (eMFV): A Combinatorial, Normed Stimulus Database of Moral and Immoral Scenarios based on Moral Foundations Theory

Vignettes are a widely used method for studying the behavioral, neural, and machine basis of moral judgment, yet extant vignette databases have been critiqued for lacking conceptual scope and contextual control. We herein aimed to address these limitations of a particularly popular moral vignette database, the Moral Foundations Vignettes (MFV; Clifford et al., 2015), which remain confined to immoral behaviors, overhauled conceptualizations of moral foundations, and uncontrolled contextual confounds. By developing and norming the expanded Moral Foundations Vignettes (eMFV), we introduce a combinatorial stimulus database of 200 novel scenarios (in English and German), featuring both moral and immoral behaviors, varied systematically across five everyday contexts and nine, recently updated moral foundations as well as conventional (non-moral) actions. In four preregistered online norming studies (two in the United States, n1 = 300, n2 = 300; two in Germany, n3 = 300, n4 = 300), independent participants provided either continuous ratings of perceived moral foundations or continuous judgments of sociomoral and affective dimensions. For both populations, our results demonstrate that the eMFV robustly elicit distinct perceptions of moral foundations, evoke reliable ratings for sociomoral and affective dimensions, and are perceived as realistic everyday scenarios. Alongside releasing the eMFV with an extensive repertoire of computational and human based norms, we discuss their future application for advancing moral judgment in minds, brains, and machines.