Perceived moral agency is measured as deviation from moral neutrality, not direction.

Evidence

Assessing agency. Two questions served as our moral agency measures. The first assessed blame/praiseworthiness by asking “How much blame or praise does this person deserve for his or her actions in life?” and was answered on a 7-point scale with endpoints extreme blame and extreme praise and neither as the midpoint. Agency was calculated by measuring the absolute deviation from the midpoint of the scale. Thus, zero was the minimum amount of agency a target could possess (4 4), and three was the maximum (|7 4| for praise, and |1 4| for blame). — Kurt Gray and Daniel M. Wegner, Moral Typecasting, 64

Categorization

• DEFINE: A key methodological innovation: agency operationalized as absolute distance from a neutral scale midpoint collapses blame and praise into a single magnitude construct — the structural template for recasting a target along a single dimension.
• XREF: This fold of blame and praise into one magnitude prefigures the reader’s own emerging construct — recategorizing a religious group along a unipolar threat axis rather than a bipolar valence axis.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Kurt Gray and Daniel M. Wegner, Moral Typecasting: Divergent…, 64