Intuicje moralne osób o różnych poglądach ekonomicznych i ich znaczenie w polskim podziale ideologicznym
Moral Intuitions of People with Different Economic Views and Their Significance in the Polish Ideological Divide

Summary/Abstract: RESEARCH OBJECTIVE: The results of research on the relationship between moral intuitions and the economic views of Poles are presented. Additionally, the existence of a relationship between self-declared political orientation and its standardized measurement was examined. The scope was limited exclusively to economic political orientation as a research gap in the literature, since the topic of moral beliefs and moral foundations had already been explored. RESEARCH PROBLEM AND METHODS: The research problem concerned the differences between people with left-wing and right-wing economic views in terms of moral intuitions related to various moral foundations and how they understand left-wing and right-wing political orientation. The study was quantitative and correlational in nature. The participants were 328 people recruited through a volunteer-based sampling procedure. The Moral Foundations Questionnaire (MFQ-PL) and the Political Beliefs Questionnaire (KPP) were used to measure the variables. THE PROCESS OF ARGUMENTATION: Two hypotheses were formulated: People with right-wing economic views experience weaker intuitions related to the foundations of care and fairness when formulating moral judgments than people with left-wing views (H1). The terms "right-wing" and "left-wing" refer more to moral/cultural issues than to economics in Poles' self-declarations of political orientation (H2). Appropriate statistical tests were used to verify the hypotheses. RESEARCH RESULTS: The results obtained confirmed both hypotheses. A possible explanation for the first is reference to the relationship between economic right-wingness and social dominance orientation. In the case of the care foundation, the differences may result from social dominance, and in the case of the fairness foundation, from how this variable was operationalized in the questionnaire. For the second hypothesis, the specificity of the Polish social transformation should be taken into account. CONCLUSIONS, INNOVATIONS, RECOMMENDATIONS: When asking about the political views of Poles in terms of left-wing and right-wing orientation, we obtain an answer that informs more about moral/cultural views than about economic orientation. Male respondents are probably an exception. Further research should include an experiment or a longitudinal study, analyze sociodemographic variables as moderators, be representative, and better capture the semantics of the terms "left" and "right".

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