Moral Flocking: How Shared Moral Foundations Shape the Social Network among First-Semester University Students

Network science offers powerful tools to map social structures, yet we know little about how shared moral foundations shape social network architecture in offline contexts. This study employs the German adaptation of the MFQ-2 to investigate foundation-specific moral homophily within a nascent cohort of first-semester psychology students at a German university. We will test four pre-registered hypotheses using a full-roster participant-as-node approach where edges represent self-reported social ties within the entire cohort. We will examine whether moral similarity predicts network structure via Quadratic Assignment Procedure correlation tests, test foundation-specific homophily effects using Exponential Random Graph Models that control for endogenous network processes and investigate how degree centrality predicts moral typicality relative to the cohort average. Additionally, we will test whether ethical positions predict structural positioning, specifically whether moral relativism predicts betweenness centrality and moral idealism predicts local clustering. Beyond moral foundations, we assess psycho-social correlates including political ideology, religiosity, need to belong, personality traits, and ethical positions to disentangle moral homophily from ideological confounds and identify why individuals vary in their propensity to form morally homophilous ties. This comprehensive network analysis reveals how moral convictions interact with social tie formation and individual positioning to foster social cohesion and division.