An Incentivized Approach to Moral Universalism: Validation and Large-Scale Evidence from China

We develop a simple incentivized measure of moral universalism and validate it using data from a large-scale online survey experiment in China. Recent studies have measured moral universalism using non-incentivized allocation tasks, where respondents divide money between two others (Enke, 2022). However, such measures may only weakly reflect moral considerations and are potentially confounded by distributional preferences. To address this, we adapt the mind cheating game so that participants’ behavior directly entails a moral trade-off, while also incorporating variation between in-group and out-group recipients. We validate our approach by examining its correlation with Enke’s measure and analyzing how both relate to a broad set of social attitudes, including preferences over trade policy, distributive justice, and security policy.