Moral rhythm: Minutes change of moral motivation based on Sina Weibo data

Abstract

Moral motivation refers to the internal driving forces that give rise to individuals’ moral behaviors for achieving their moral goals. It typically contains two dimensions: Agency and communion. Agency denotes motives to advance the well-being of self within a social hierarchy, as manifested in achievement, social power, or material wealth. Communion denotes motives to advance the well-being of others, as manifested in concerns for disadvantaged, distant others, or the ecological well-being of the planet. Based on Sina Weibo data, the current study has depicted how moral motivation fluctuated throughout the day. Our Weibo data contained tens of millions of social media user statistics and hundreds of microblogs. Two separate levels of analysis were used to explore the changes of moral motivation. The first level was group-means level. In this level, we used all data we collected including all microblog users, and the “group-means” means the word frequencies of communion or agency per minute, which neglected the individual differences. The second level was individual-means level. In this level, only the most active individuals were included. When we calculated the moral motivation per minute, we first looked at the communion/agency of each user, and then averaged the results of all users. Results indicated that moral motivation in the morning was higher than that in the afternoon, evening, and night, with rejuvenating benefits of eating and sleeping at both group level and individual level. Moreover, there appeared a diverging effect between agency and communion. Specifically, we have found that after eating (especially lunch) and sleeping (including naps around noon), moral motivation peaked and then decreased until the next time for food and bed, which is consistent with the traditional Chinese belief that every morning is a refreshing start in everyday life. Our findings also extend previous research on self-regulatory strength depletion and restoration to the domain of moral motivation, and changes of moral motivation might be the real cause and underlying mechanism behind the behavioral differences in the morning and the afternoon. The current study makes contributions in several areas. First, this research has provided a complete picture of moral changes throughout the day for the very first time based on Sina Weibo data. Second, this research advances the literature on moral behaviors by including changes of moral motivation, which might be a crucial and new mediator for moral behavioral changes. Third, our findings increase the generalizability of previous research on moral behaviors by replicating the findings with a Chinese sample. Finally, compared with survey study and experiments, the social media data we collected and utilized include more comprehensive and in-depth information, which contributes to the robustness of our results. Taken together, our findings provide further validation and empirical support for the morning morality effect and reveal the dynamic pattern of the changes of human moral motivation.