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We report on the development and initial validation of the Moralization of Everyday Life Scale (MELS), designed to measure variations in people's assignment of moral weight to commonplace behaviors. In Study 1, participants reported their judgments for a large number of potential moral infractions in everyday life; principal components analysis revealed 6 main dimensions of these judgments. In Study 2, scores on the 30-item MELS showed high reliability and distinctness from the Big 5 personality traits. In Study 3, scores on the MELS were strongly correlated with scores on an early scale of moral judgments, suggesting convergent validity.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We thank Jon Bourn, David Ferrier, and Lauren Maurer for their help with data collection. In addition, we are grateful to a wide variety of people who commented on item lists, especially Jesse Graham, Jonathan Haidt, Ronnie Janoff-Bulman, Jason Retik, and Linda Skitka.