Conscience Measure

1. Abstract

The Conscience Measure (Schutt & Exline, 2023, 2025) is a psychometrically validated self-report instrument designed to quantify an individual’s subjective beliefs, behavioral tendencies, and evaluative attitudes regarding their conscience—defined operationally as the inner feeling, voice, or cognitive-affective process that monitors and guides moral conduct. Comprising 16 items organized across three distinct subscales, the instrument assesses: (a) Following One’s Conscience (8 items measuring the self-reported frequency of listening to, noticing, attending to, or conversely disregarding and violating one’s moral compass); (b) Importance of One’s Conscience (4 items evaluating the personal value, essentiality, and perceived utility attributed to the conscience); and (c) Reliability of One’s Conscience (4 items gauging the perceived epistemic accuracy, dependability, and trustworthiness of the conscience). Grounded in historical frameworks of moral self-regulation such as the Stilwell Conscience Interview (Stilwell & Galvin, 1985) and modern social-cognitive paradigms of moral agency, the scale was validated within a diverse cohort of United States adult respondents recruited via Amazon Mechanical Turk. Psychometric evaluation indicates exceptional internal consistency across dimensions, with Cronbach’s alpha coefficients ranging from .86 to .94. Exploratory factor analyses demonstrate unidimensional structures for the Importance and Reliability dimensions, while revealing a two-factor configuration within the Following subscale reflecting positively valenced adherence and negatively valenced disregard. Preliminary construct validity investigations confirm robust convergent and discriminant relationships with domain-specific criteria, including the Perceptions of Conscience Questionnaire (Dahlqvist et al., 2007), established inventories of personality traits (specifically Big Five Conscientiousness), and targeted face-valid visual analog sliders. The Conscience Measure provides clinical psychologists, personality researchers, and scholars of morality and religion with a concise, reliable, and methodologically sound tool to examine the dynamics of moral identity, moral decision-making, and spiritual struggles.

2. Keywords

Conscience, Moral Psychology, Conscience Measure, Moral Beliefs, Moral Identity, Conscientiousness, Moral Agency, Psychometrics, Self-Regulation, Moral Decision-Making, Schutt and Exline, Ethics Assessment

3. Authors

The Conscience Measure was developed by researchers within the Department of Psychological Sciences at Case Western Reserve University:

• William A. Schutt, Ph.D. — Department of Psychological Sciences, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, United States. ORCID: 0000-0003-0473-1380. Email: [email protected].
• Julie J. Exline, Ph.D. — Professor, Department of Psychological Sciences, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, United States. Correspondence Address: Department of Psychological Sciences, Case Western Reserve University, 10900 Euclid Avenue, Cleveland, Ohio, 44106-7123, United States.

4. Purpose

The overarching purpose of the Conscience Measure is to provide a standardized, empirically validated, and quantitatively rigorous inventory capable of measuring an individual’s explicit cognitive appraisals, operational adherence, and epistemic attitudes toward their conscience. Although the concept of “conscience” has occupied a central position within classical philosophy, theological discourse, and developmental psychoanalysis for centuries, empirical psychological science has historically struggled to operationalize the construct due to its multifaceted, highly subjective, and often mystical connotations. Many existing measures historically conflated conscience with generalized guilt proneness, trait neuroticism, punitive superego strength, or broad prosocial compliance.

To overcome these conceptual limitations, Schutt and Exline (2023, 2025) formulated the Conscience Measure to assess not the content of specific moral codes, but rather the functional relationship that individuals maintain with their internal moral monitoring agency. Specifically, the instrument seeks to answer three critical empirical questions: First, to what degree do individuals systematically heed, rely upon, or actively ignore the intuitive or deliberative signals generated by their conscience during decision-making episodes? Second, how much axiological weight or subjective importance do individuals assign to this internal mechanism in their overall self-concept and everyday behavioral choices? Third, how much epistemic trust do individuals place in the accuracy and reliability of their conscience as an objective guide to right and wrong action?

From a research perspective, the Conscience Measure facilitates the empirical investigation of critical questions within moral psychology, personality theory, and the psychology of religion and spirituality. It enables researchers to systematically delineate how beliefs about the origin and malleability of conscience—such as whether one attributes conscience to divine guidance, cultural conditioning, or evolutionary biology—interact with behavioral conformity or resistance to internal moral distress. Moreover, it allows scholars to disaggregate conscience as a subjective moral phenomenon from broader, structurally correlated personality traits such as trait conscientiousness or agreeableness.

In clinical and counseling settings, the scale offers meaningful diagnostic utility. Disturbances in conscience functioning represent prominent features in a spectrum of clinical pathologies. At one extreme, severe conscience suppression, emotional blunting, and chronic disregard of moral signals correlate with psychopathy, antisocial personality traits, and externalizing behavioral disorders. At the opposite extreme, hyperactive, excessively punitive, or scrupulous moral monitoring contributes significantly to clinical presentations of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) (particularly the scrupulosity subtype), severe clinical depression characterized by morbid guilt, and moral injury among military veterans, healthcare providers, and emergency responders. By isolating behavioral following, perceived importance, and epistemic reliability, clinicians can identify specific dysfunctional cognitions (e.g., an individual who views their conscience as utterly essential yet deeply inaccurate, generating agonizing self-doubt and chronic rumination) and tailor cognitive-behavioral or acceptance-based interventions accordingly.

5. Psychological Construct

The construct measured by the Conscience Measure is conceptualized as an integrated, multi-component psychological phenomenon consisting of cognitive, affective, and behavioral dimensions. Rather than evaluating compliance with a fixed external set of normative ethical principles, the scale captures the phenomenological experience of moral self-reflection and personal accountability. This operationalization breaks down into three distinct, structurally correlated dimensions:

1. Following One’s Conscience

The Following dimension assesses the behavioral and attentional frequency with which an individual engages their conscience during active decision-making processes. This encompasses not merely overt post-decision adherence, but the attentional vigilance directed toward internal ethical feedback. Items in this subscale capture the proactive listening, conscious noticing, and reliance upon moral feelings (e.g., “Listen to your conscience?”, “Rely on your conscience?”), as well as deliberate divergence, suppression, or negligence of those internal warnings (e.g., “Ignore your conscience?”, “Make choices that go against your conscience?”). Psychologically, high scores on this dimension reflect strong self-regulatory execution and high moral agency, wherein an individual displays low discrepancies between internal moral judgment and actualized behavioral action. Conversely, low scores or elevated scores on the negatively phrased items signify states of moral dissonance, akrasia (weakness of will), or deliberate moral disengagement.

2. Importance of One’s Conscience

The Importance dimension quantifies the subjective value, centrality, and existential significance an individual assigns to their conscience. Drawing upon concepts from moral identity theory, this dimension measures the degree to which an individual views their moral guidance system as an indispensable component of their psychological and ethical existence. Evaluated via descriptive descriptors—such as viewing conscience as “Important,” “Valuable,” “Essential,” and “Useful”—this subscale captures the axiological status of the moral self. An individual who scores high on this dimension considers conscience to be a non-negotiable anchor of self-definition, providing substantial motivational force for moral action regardless of social pressures. An individual scoring low may view their conscience as an incidental or irrelevant byproduct of socialization that warrants minimal prioritization in real-world functioning.

3. Reliability of One’s Conscience

The Reliability dimension captures the individual’s meta-cognitive appraisal of their conscience’s epistemic trustworthiness and accuracy. Moral philosophers and cognitive psychologists alike recognize that possessing an internal moral compass does not inherently guarantee faith in its navigational precision. This dimension specifically probes whether an individual perceives their moral judgments and internal feelings to be “Accurate,” “Reliable,” “Trustworthy,” and “Dependable.” High scores indicate elevated moral epistemic trust—a strong subjective confidence that when the conscience speaks, it signals genuine ethical truths and dependable behavioral paths. Low scores reflect moral epistemic skepticism, self-doubt, or recognition of cognitive distortion, wherein an individual experiences their conscience as prone to bias, error, erratic variability, or irrational societal guilt.

6. Theoretical Framework

The Conscience Measure is anchored in an interdisciplinary theoretical framework synthesizing classical developmental theories of moral interiorization, psychoanalytic conceptualizations of moral self-monitoring, social-cognitive models of self-regulation, and modern moral identity theory.

Classical Developmental and Psychoanalytic Roots

Historically, psychological formulations of conscience emerged through the work of Sigmund Freud, who framed conscience as the punitive, judging subdivision of the superego. Freud hypothesized that the conscience represents the internalization of parental and societal prohibitions, maintained through the deployment of guilt, anxiety, and moral self-punishment. Subsequent developmental theorists, including Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg, moved away from purely punitive interpretations, reconceptualizing conscience as the structural emergence of moral reasoning from heteronomous obedience toward autonomous principles of justice and human welfare.

A crucial empirical predecessor directly informing the Conscience Measure is the Stilwell Conscience Interview (Stilwell & Galvin, 1985; Stilwell et al., 1991). Stilwell and colleagues conceptualized conscience as a complex psychological domain comprising five distinct developmental domains: moral emotional responsiveness, moral valuation, moralized defense mechanisms, moral volition, and moralized attachment. The Conscience Measure operationalizes several critical components identified in Stilwell’s clinical interview model into a modern, standardized, psychometric questionnaire suitable for adult populations, focusing sharply on moral volition (Following), moral valuation (Importance), and epistemic confidence (Reliability).

Social-Cognitive and Moral Identity Frameworks

The architecture of the Conscience Measure is heavily underpinned by Albert Bandura’s social-cognitive theory of self-regulation and moral agency (Bandura, 1999). Bandura posits that moral conduct is governed by continuous self-monitoring, judgment of behavior against personal standards, and affective self-reactions (such as anticipatory pride or self-censure). The Following subscale assesses this self-regulatory execution. Bandura’s complementary theory of moral disengagement demonstrates that individuals often deactivate internal moral monitors to execute harmful acts without subjective discomfort; the negative items in the Following subscale directly capture this momentary or habitual deactivation.

Furthermore, the instrument incorporates Augusto Blasi’s (1983) Self-Model of Moral Functioning, which argues that moral cognition only translates into moral action when moral values are integrated into the core self-concept—a construct later expanded by Aquino and Reed (2002) as Moral Identity. The Importance subscale of the Conscience Measure directly evaluates this centrality. Finally, the Reliability subscale bridges social intuitionist models of morality (Haidt, 2001), which demonstrate that moral judgments often arise as rapid, affective intuitions whose epistemological validity must subsequently be appraised by the conscious, deliberative mind.

7. Validity

Empirical evaluation of the Conscience Measure has established strong initial evidence for construct, convergent, and discriminant validity across general adult samples (Schutt & Exline, 2023, 2025).

Convergent Validity

Convergent validity was evaluated by examining bivariate correlations between the three subscales of the Conscience Measure and existing theoretical criteria:

• Visual Analog Slider Items: To establish face and concurrent validity, participants completed single-item visual analog continuous slider scales directly querying their tendencies to follow their conscience, the importance of their conscience, and its perceived reliability. The multi-item subscales demonstrated high, statistically significant positive correlations with their respective single-item criterion markers (typically r > .70), demonstrating that the item batteries accurately capture their intended operational definitions.
• Perceptions of Conscience Questionnaire (PCQ): The subscales exhibited theoretically anticipated patterns of convergence with relevant dimensions from the Perceptions of Conscience Questionnaire (Dahlqvist et al., 2007), an instrument originally developed in healthcare settings to measure the perception of conscience as an active voice, a moral authority, and an internal demand system. Subscales of the Conscience Measure correlated positively with viewing conscience as an authoritative, guiding voice and as an expression of personal integrity.
• Trait Conscientiousness: In accordance with personality theory, the Conscience Measure subscales—most notably the Following One’s Conscience subscale—demonstrated moderate, statistically significant positive associations with the Conscientiousness domain of Big Five personality inventories. This confirms that while the measure relates to broad self-discipline, duty, and deliberate reflection, it remains conceptually and statistically distinct from general personality conscientiousness.

Discriminant Validity

Discriminant validity was established by confirming that the Conscience Measure does not merely function as an indicator of neurotic guilt, psychological distress, or generalized negative affectivity. Correlations with measures of pathological guilt, social desirability bias, and neuroticism were low to negligible, indicating that measuring an individual’s conscious evaluation of their moral guidance system is not redundant with measuring affective distress or defensiveness. Furthermore, the moderate inter-correlations among the three subscales themselves (typically ranging from .50 to .70) demonstrate that while Following, Importance, and Reliability share underlying variance associated with an active moral self, they assess distinct psychometric constructs requiring independent evaluation.

8. Reliability

The Conscience Measure demonstrates outstanding psychometric reliability across adult populations, evidenced by robust coefficients of internal consistency reported in initial validation investigations (Schutt & Exline, 2023, 2025).

Internal Consistency

Across validation samples, the instrument’s subscales have consistently exhibited Cronbach’s alpha ($lpha$) coefficients well above the standard .80 benchmark for psychometric adequacy, frequently meeting or exceeding the .90 threshold recommended for clinical diagnostic and high-stakes research applications:

• Following One’s Conscience (8 items): Demonstrates an overall Cronbach’s alpha ranging between .86 and .90. Item-total correlations for this scale remain consistently high, indicating that both the behavioral adherence items and the reverse-scored disengagement items align strongly along the overarching self-regulatory construct.
• Importance of One’s Conscience (4 items): Demonstrates exceptional internal consistency, with Cronbach’s alpha coefficients ranging from .90 to .94. The homogeneous lexical focus on the functional value of conscience yields exceptionally cohesive inter-item correlation matrices.
• Reliability of One’s Conscience (4 items): Demonstrates strong internal reliability, yielding Cronbach’s alpha coefficients between .88 and .92. The four descriptive items assessing epistemic trust display robust inter-item correlations without excessive statistical redundancy.

Measurement Precision

Given the high internal consistency indices, the standard error of measurement (SEM) associated with each subscale is minimal, indicating high observed-score precision across adult community and convenience samples. Although formal test-retest reliability over longitudinal intervals has not yet been documented in initial published studies, the trait-like conceptualization of moral identity and moral valuation provides a strong theoretical basis for anticipating temporal stability over moderate periods in the absence of major moral trauma or life transformations.

9. Factor Analysis

The structural dimensionality of the Conscience Measure has been evaluated using exploratory factor analysis (EFA) within adult validation samples (Schutt & Exline, 2023, 2025), providing clear structural clarity for each component subscale.

Exploratory Factor Analysis: Following One’s Conscience

When the 8 items comprising the Following One’s Conscience subscale were subjected to exploratory factor analysis (utilizing principal axis factoring or maximum likelihood extraction with oblique rotation), the empirical data yielded a distinct two-factor solution, clearly bifurcated by item valence:

• Factor 1: Positively Worded Adherence Items
  • Eigenvalue: 4.18
  • Variance Explained: Accounts for approximately 52% of the total item variance.
  • Content: Comprises the 5 positively worded items reflecting conscious attention, reliance, and compliance with conscience (“Follow your conscience?”, “Listen to your conscience?”, “Notice your conscience?”, “Pay attention to your conscience?”, “Rely on your conscience?”). All items load heavily onto this primary factor (loadings typically exceeding .70).
• Factor 2: Negatively Worded Disregard Items
  • Eigenvalue: 1.40
  • Variance Explained: Accounts for approximately 17% of the total item variance.
  • Content: Comprises the 3 negatively worded items capturing moral divergence and intentional disregard (“Ignore your conscience?”, “Make choices that go against your conscience?”, “Disregard your conscience?”). These items load robustly onto this secondary factor (loadings > .65).

Methodologically, psychometricians frequently debate whether such two-factor splits in mixed-valence scales reflect substantively distinct behavioral dimensions (i.e., active adherence vs. active rebellion/suppression) or represent a classic method effect stemming from item polarity. Schutt and Exline noted that while reverse-scoring allows computation of an omnibus “Following” score, researchers investigating nuanced moral disengagement may profitably analyze the two sub-factors independently.

Factor Structures: Importance and Reliability Subscales

In contrast to the Following subscale, exploratory factor analyses conducted on the 4-item Importance subscale and the 4-item Reliability subscale revealed pristine unidimensional structures:

• Importance Subscale: A single dominant factor emerged with an eigenvalue well above 3.0, explaining over 75% of the total variance. All four items (“Important”, “Valuable”, “Essential”, “Useful”) exhibited profound factor loadings exceeding .80, confirming strict unidimensionality.
• Reliability Subscale: Similarly, factor analysis confirmed a solitary factor with an eigenvalue exceeding 2.8, accounting for greater than 70% of the variance. All four items (“Accurate”, “Reliable”, “Trustworthy”, “Dependable”) loaded strongly (> .75), demonstrating that epistemic trust in one’s conscience represents a highly unified psychometric construct.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

The Conscience Measure is structured as an efficient, self-administered questionnaire. The technical and operational characteristics of the instrument are summarized below:

• Test Type: Original Multi-Dimensional Psychometric Inventory / Self-Report Questionnaire.
• Number of Items: 16 total items.
  • Following One’s Conscience: 8 items (5 positive, 3 negative).
  • Importance of One’s Conscience: 4 items.
  • Reliability of One’s Conscience: 4 items.
• Administration Format: Standardized self-report; administered via digital survey platforms (e.g., Qualtrics, REDCap) or paper-and-pencil formats. Typical completion duration is approximately 3 to 5 minutes.
• Target Population: Adults (aged 18 years and older); validated within United States community and Mechanical Turk adult samples across diverse demographic spectra.
• Response Scales:
  • Following Subscale: 5-point frequency Likert scale:
    • 1 = Never
    • 2 = Rarely
    • 3 = Sometimes
    • 4 = Often
    • 5 = Always
  • Importance Subscale: 5-point intensity Likert scale:
    • 1 = Not at all
    • 2 = A little bit
    • 3 = Moderately
    • 4 = Quite a bit
    • 5 = Extremely
  • Reliability Subscale: 5-point intensity Likert scale:
    • 1 = Not at all
    • 2 = A little bit
    • 3 = Moderately
    • 4 = Quite a bit
    • 5 = Extremely
• Scoring and Transformation Procedures:
  • Reverse Coding: Within the Following One’s Conscience subscale, the three negatively worded items must be reverse-coded prior to computing composite scores: Item 3 (“Ignore your conscience?”), Item 4 (“Make choices that go against your conscience?”), and Item 7 (“Disregard your conscience?”). For these items, scoring is inverted: 1 becomes 5, 2 becomes 4, 3 remains 3, 4 becomes 2, and 5 becomes 1.
  • Subscale Score Calculation: Mean scores or sum scores may be computed for each subscale independently. It is standard practice to compute the mean score (ranging from 1.0 to 5.0) to preserve interpretability relative to the original Likert anchor descriptors:
    • Following Score: Sum of items 1, 2, 5, 6, 8 plus reverse-scored items 3, 4, 7, divided by 8.
    • Importance Score: Sum of items 9, 10, 11, 12, divided by 4.
    • Reliability Score: Sum of items 13, 14, 15, 16, divided by 4.
  • Bifactor Alternative for Following: Researchers investigating moral disengagement can separately compute a 5-item Conscience Adherence score (mean of items 1, 2, 5, 6, 8) and a 3-item Conscience Disregard score (mean of items 3, 4, 7 without reverse coding).
• Interpretation: Higher scores across all three subscales indicate, respectively: greater habitual vigilance and behavioral conformity to moral signals; higher prioritization and existential centrality of conscience; and greater subjective certainty regarding the epistemic accuracy of one’s moral judgments.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Conscience Measure was finalized and psychometrically documented in 2023, with formal archival publication appearing in 2025 (Schutt & Exline, 2025).

• Permissions: The scale is freely accessible for non-commercial academic research, empirical scholarship, and graduate or university educational instruction. Scholars wishing to implement the measure are encouraged to cite the foundational publications by Schutt and Exline.
• Commercial Use: Commercial application, proprietary software deployment, or incorporation into fee-for-service clinical assessment platforms requires prior explicit written authorization from the primary copyright holders and authors.
• Fee: There is no fee associated with the educational, scientific, or clinical research administration of the Conscience Measure.
• Inquiries and Contact: Researchers seeking collaboration, scoring keys, or supplementary translation permissions should contact William A. Schutt, Ph.D., via email at [email protected], or Julie J. Exline, Ph.D., at Case Western Reserve University.

12. References

Aquino, K., & Reed, A., II. (2002). The self-importance of moral identity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83(6), 1423–1440. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.83.6.1423

Bandura, A. (1999). Moral disengagement in the perpetration of inhumanities. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 3(3), 193–209. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327957pspr0303_1

Blasi, A. (1983). Moral cognition and moral action: A theoretical perspective. Developmental Review, 3(2), 178–210. https://doi.org/10.1016/0273-2297(83)90029-1

Dahlqvist, V., Eriksson, S., Glasberg, A. L., Lindahl, E., Strandberg, G., Söderberg, A., & Norberg, A. (2007). Development of the Perceptions of Conscience Questionnaire. Scandinavian Journal of Caring Sciences, 21(2), 272–282. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1471-6712.2007.00512.x

Haidt, J. (2001). The emotional dog and its rational tail: A social intuitionist approach to moral judgment. Psychological Review, 108(4), 814–834. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.108.4.814

Schutt, W. A., & Exline, J. J. (2023). The Conscience Measure: Development, psychometric properties, and structural validation. Unpublished instrument documentation, Case Western Reserve University.

Schutt, W. A., & Exline, J. J. (2025). Do adults believe that God or the devil can influence their conscience? Links between religion/spirituality, beliefs about the conscience, and attempts to follow one’s conscience. Spirituality in Clinical Practice, 12(1), 98–113. https://doi.org/10.1037/scp0000320

Stilwell, B. M., & Galvin, M. R. (1985). Conceptualization of conscience in 11–12-year-olds. Journal of the American Academy of Child Psychiatry, 24(5), 630–636. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0002-7138(09)60067-1

Stilwell, B. M., Galvin, M. R., & Kopta, S. M. (1991). Conceptualization of conscience in 5- to 17-year-olds. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 30(1), 16–21. https://doi.org/10.1097/00004583-199101000-00003

13. Items of the Scale