The Conscience Measure<\/strong> (Schutt & Exline, 2023, 2025<\/a>) is a psychometrically validated self-report instrument designed to quantify an individual\u2019s subjective beliefs, behavioral tendencies, and evaluative attitudes regarding their conscience\u2014defined 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<\/em> (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<\/em> (4 items evaluating the personal value, essentiality, and perceived utility attributed to the conscience); and (c) Reliability of One’s Conscience<\/em> (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<\/a>) 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\u2019s 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<\/a>), established inventories of personality traits (specifically Big Five Conscientiousness<\/a>), 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.<\/p>\n Conscience, Moral Psychology, Conscience Measure, Moral Beliefs, Moral Identity, Conscientiousness, Moral Agency, Psychometrics, Self-Regulation, Moral Decision-Making, Schutt and Exline, Ethics Assessment<\/p>\n The Conscience Measure was developed by researchers within the Department of Psychological Sciences at Case Western Reserve University:<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/em> 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?<\/p>\n 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\u2014such as whether one attributes conscience to divine guidance, cultural conditioning, or evolutionary biology\u2014interact 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.<\/p>\n 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)<\/a> (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.<\/p>\n 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:<\/p>\n The Following<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n The Importance<\/em> dimension quantifies the subjective value, centrality, and existential significance an individual assigns to their conscience. Drawing upon concepts from moral identity theory<\/a>, 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\u2014such as viewing conscience as “Important,” “Valuable,” “Essential,” and “Useful”\u2014this 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.<\/p>\n The Reliability<\/em> dimension captures the individual’s meta-cognitive appraisal of their conscience\u2019s 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\u2014a 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Historically, psychological formulations of conscience emerged through the work of Sigmund Freud<\/a>, who framed conscience as the punitive, judging subdivision of the superego<\/em>. 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<\/a> and Lawrence Kohlberg<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n A crucial empirical predecessor directly informing the Conscience Measure is the Stilwell Conscience Interview<\/em> (Stilwell & Galvin, 1985<\/a>; 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\u2019s 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).<\/p>\n The architecture of the Conscience Measure is heavily underpinned by Albert Bandura’s<\/a> social-cognitive theory of self-regulation and moral agency (Bandura, 1999<\/a>). 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<\/em> subscale assesses this self-regulatory execution. Bandura\u2019s complementary theory of moral disengagement<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n Furthermore, the instrument incorporates Augusto Blasi\u2019s (1983) Self-Model of Moral Functioning<\/em>, which argues that moral cognition only translates into moral action when moral values are integrated into the core self-concept\u2014a construct later expanded by Aquino and Reed (2002<\/a>) as Moral Identity<\/em>. The Importance<\/em> subscale of the Conscience Measure directly evaluates this centrality. Finally, the Reliability<\/em> subscale bridges social intuitionist models of morality (Haidt, 2001<\/a>), which demonstrate that moral judgments often arise as rapid, affective intuitions whose epistemological validity must subsequently be appraised by the conscious, deliberative mind.<\/p>\n 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<\/a>).<\/p>\n Convergent validity was evaluated by examining bivariate correlations between the three subscales of the Conscience Measure and existing theoretical criteria:<\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/a>).<\/p>\n Across validation samples, the instrument\u2019s subscales have consistently exhibited Cronbach\u2019s alpha ($\u0007lpha$<\/span>) 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:<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n The structural dimensionality of the Conscience Measure has been evaluated using exploratory factor analysis (EFA) within adult validation samples (Schutt & Exline, 2023, 2025<\/a>), providing clear structural clarity for each component subscale.<\/p>\n When the 8 items comprising the Following One’s Conscience<\/em> 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<\/strong>, clearly bifurcated by item valence:<\/p>\n 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<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n In contrast to the Following subscale, exploratory factor analyses conducted on the 4-item Importance<\/em> subscale and the 4-item Reliability<\/em> subscale revealed pristine unidimensional structures<\/strong>:<\/p>\n The Conscience Measure is structured as an efficient, self-administered questionnaire. The technical and operational characteristics of the instrument are summarized below:<\/p>\n The Conscience Measure was finalized and psychometrically documented in 2023<\/strong>, with formal archival publication appearing in 2025<\/strong> (Schutt & Exline, 2025<\/a>).<\/p>\n Aquino, K., & Reed, A., II. (2002). The self-importance of moral identity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology<\/em>, 83(6), 1423\u20131440. https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1037\/0022-3514.83.6.1423<\/a><\/p>\n Bandura, A. (1999). Moral disengagement in the perpetration of inhumanities. Personality and Social Psychology Review<\/em>, 3(3), 193\u2013209. https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1207\/s15327957pspr0303_1<\/a><\/p>\n Blasi, A. (1983). Moral cognition and moral action: A theoretical perspective. Developmental Review<\/em>, 3(2), 178\u2013210. https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1016\/0273-2297(83)90029-1<\/a><\/p>\n Dahlqvist, V., Eriksson, S., Glasberg, A. L., Lindahl, E., Strandberg, G., S\u00f6derberg, A., & Norberg, A. (2007). Development of the Perceptions of Conscience Questionnaire. Scandinavian Journal of Caring Sciences<\/em>, 21(2), 272\u2013282. https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1111\/j.1471-6712.2007.00512.x<\/a><\/p>\n Haidt, J. (2001). The emotional dog and its rational tail: A social intuitionist approach to moral judgment. Psychological Review<\/em>, 108(4), 814\u2013834. https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1037\/0033-295X.108.4.814<\/a><\/p>\n Schutt, W. A., & Exline, J. J. (2023). The Conscience Measure: Development, psychometric properties, and structural validation<\/em>. Unpublished instrument documentation, Case Western Reserve University.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s conscience. Spirituality in Clinical Practice<\/em>, 12(1), 98\u2013113. https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1037\/scp0000320<\/a><\/p>\n Stilwell, B. M., & Galvin, M. R. (1985). Conceptualization of conscience in 11\u201312-year-olds. Journal of the American Academy of Child Psychiatry<\/em>, 24(5), 630\u2013636. https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1016\/S0002-7138(09)60067-1<\/a><\/p>\n 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<\/em>, 30(1), 16\u201321. https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1097\/00004583-199101000-00003<\/a><\/p>\n Below are the official items and authentic response formats of the 16-item Conscience Measure<\/strong> as published by Schutt and Exline.<\/p>\n Prompt:<\/em> When making decisions, how often do you:<\/p>\n Prompt:<\/em> To what extent do you think your conscience is:<\/p>\n2. Keywords<\/h2>\n
3. Authors<\/h2>\n
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4. Purpose<\/h2>\n
5. Psychological Construct<\/h2>\n
1. Following One’s Conscience<\/h3>\n
2. Importance of One’s Conscience<\/h3>\n
3. Reliability of One’s Conscience<\/h3>\n
6. Theoretical Framework<\/h2>\n
Classical Developmental and Psychoanalytic Roots<\/h3>\n
Social-Cognitive and Moral Identity Frameworks<\/h3>\n
7. Validity<\/h2>\n
Convergent Validity<\/h3>\n
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Discriminant Validity<\/h3>\n
8. Reliability<\/h2>\n
Internal Consistency<\/h3>\n
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Measurement Precision<\/h3>\n
9. Factor Analysis<\/h2>\n
Exploratory Factor Analysis: Following One’s Conscience<\/h3>\n
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Factor Structures: Importance and Reliability Subscales<\/h3>\n
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10. Instrument \/ Measurement Tool<\/h2>\n
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11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year<\/h2>\n
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was94@case.edu<\/code>, or Julie J. Exline, Ph.D., at Case Western Reserve University.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n12. References<\/h2>\n
13. Items of the Scale<\/h2>\n
Subscale 1: Following One’s Conscience<\/h3>\n
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\n \n#<\/th>\n Item<\/th>\n Never (1)<\/th>\n Rarely (2)<\/th>\n Sometimes (3)<\/th>\n Often (4)<\/th>\n Always (5)<\/th>\n<\/tr>\n<\/thead>\n \n 1<\/td>\n Follow your conscience?<\/td>\n 1<\/td>\n 2<\/td>\n 3<\/td>\n 4<\/td>\n 5<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n \n 2<\/td>\n Listen to your conscience?<\/td>\n 1<\/td>\n 2<\/td>\n 3<\/td>\n 4<\/td>\n 5<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n \n 3<\/td>\n Ignore your conscience? [Reverse-scored]<\/em><\/td>\n 1<\/td>\n 2<\/td>\n 3<\/td>\n 4<\/td>\n 5<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n \n 4<\/td>\n Make choices that go against your conscience? [Reverse-scored]<\/em><\/td>\n 1<\/td>\n 2<\/td>\n 3<\/td>\n 4<\/td>\n 5<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n \n 5<\/td>\n Notice your conscience?<\/td>\n 1<\/td>\n 2<\/td>\n 3<\/td>\n 4<\/td>\n 5<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n \n 6<\/td>\n Pay attention to your conscience?<\/td>\n 1<\/td>\n 2<\/td>\n 3<\/td>\n 4<\/td>\n 5<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n \n 7<\/td>\n Disregard your conscience? [Reverse-scored]<\/em><\/td>\n 1<\/td>\n 2<\/td>\n 3<\/td>\n 4<\/td>\n 5<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n \n 8<\/td>\n Rely on your conscience?<\/td>\n 1<\/td>\n 2<\/td>\n 3<\/td>\n 4<\/td>\n 5<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n Subscale 2: Importance of One’s Conscience<\/h3>\n
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