Demographic correlates of moral differences in the contemporary United States

• Examines how moral constructs relate to socio-demographic characteristics.
• Morality operationalized as moral identity, values, and moral foundations.
• Uses Bayesian model averaging to better capture parameter uncertainty.
• Gender, age cohort and religious affiliation predict the most moral outcomes.

Bourdieu argued that cultural tastes have tangible social and economic consequences. Some work suggests that moral differences might have similar effects, but it is not yet clear how morality is distributed across the social landscape, and hence where moral variation is likely to occur. This research note examines the relationships between several well-established morality measures and an extensive set of demographic variables using Bayesian model averaging (BMA), a statistical technique that better captures uncertainty in parameter estimates. Results show that gender, age cohort, and religious affiliation predict the widest range of moral constructs, followed by education and marital status. Comparison with earlier work suggests that gender, age, and religious affiliation are important predictors of morality generally.