Moral Foundations Research Articles

In case of emergency break glass: Reckoning with Project 2025.

Public health nursing frequently finds itself at the nexus of community and politics. It is a precarious position, one that demands a keen understanding of how decisions made in the halls of power impact the most vulnerable among us. From gutting Medicaid and TANF to eroding protections for LGBTQ individuals and female-headed households, Project 2025 is an affront to public health nursing's moral foundation and professional ethos. This personal reflection challenges nurses to embrace their role as advocatesfor a more just and equitable society.

Marriage Navigation: The Ethical Foundations and Political Realism of Tirukural and Alta 347 Ana Stra

Marriage Navigation: The Ethical Foundations and Political Realism of Tirukural and Alta 347 Ana Stra

Analyzing digital propaganda and conflict rhetoric: a study on Russia’s bot-driven campaigns and counter-narratives during the Ukraine crisis

The dissemination of disinformation has become a formidable weapon, with nation-states exploiting social media platforms to engineer narratives favorable to their geopolitical interests. This study delved into Russia’s orchestrated disinformation campaign, in three times periods of the 2022 Russian-Ukraine War: its incursion, its midpoint and the Ukrainian Kherson counteroffensive. This period is marked by a sophisticated blend of bot-driven strategies to mold online discourse. Utilizing a dataset derived from Twitter, the research examines how Russia leveraged automated agents to advance its political narrative, shedding light on the global implications of such digital warfare and the swift emergence of counter-narratives to thwart the disinformation campaign. This paper introduces a methodological framework that adopts a multiple-analysis model approach, initially harnessing unsupervised learning techniques, with TweetBERT for topic modeling, to dissect disinformation dissemination within the dataset. Utilizing Moral Foundation Theory and the BEND Framework, this paper dissects social-cyber interactions in maneuver warfare, thereby understanding the evolution of bot tactics employed by Russia and its counterparts within the Russian-Ukraine crisis. The findings highlight the instrumental role of bots in amplifying political narratives and manipulating public opinion, with distinct strategies in narrative and community maneuvers identified through the BEND framework. Moral Foundation Theory reveals how moral justifications were embedded in these narratives, showcasing the complexity of digital propaganda and its impact on public perception and geopolitical dynamics. The study shows how pro-Russian bots were used to foster a narrative of protection and necessity, thereby seeking to legitimize Russia’s actions in Ukraine whilst degrading both NATO and Ukraine’s actions. Simultaneously, the study explores the resilient counter-narratives of pro-Ukraine forces, revealing their strategic use of social media platforms to counteract Russian disinformation, foster global solidarity, and uphold democratic narratives. These efforts highlight the emerging role of social media as a digital battleground for narrative supremacy, where both sides leverage information warfare tactics to sway public opinion.

Progressive moral foundations and empathic concern: Facilitators of sexual assault bystander intervention.

Progressive moral foundations and empathic concern: Facilitators of sexual assault bystander intervention.

A post-Hegelian theory of human rights: beyond recognition and the state

This article develops a post-Hegelian social and political theory of human rights. To do this, it moves past two legacies that can be traced back to Hegel’s philosophy: his theory of recognition and his views about the embeddedness of rights within states. IR often misinterprets Hegel’s recognition theory as applying within a public world of state action. However, Hegel argues that recognition occurs before rather than within a social world. Instead, I show how and why Hegel’s analysis of Sophocles’ play Antigone is a more fruitful starting point for theorising contemporary international practices. I mobilise a Hegelian social ontology of ‘ethical life’ and a post-Hegelian critique of statism and Eurocentrism to argue that human rights should be understood as an independent field of action in which agency is embedded, rather than as a practice that is tied to sovereignty and states. Several conclusions about the ontology and epistemology of human rights stem from this analysis. Human rights practice brings forms of action and obligation into being. It enables collective (not only individual) action. It requires the exercise of humility rather than hubris. Finally, it invites a discussion of how agents can bridge external and internal perspectives to evaluate the actions that seem to be required by their practices. This critical exploration and re-interpretation of Hegel’s early work corrects IR’s tendency to use his later and more statist writings to locate and concretise the grounds for ethics.

The moral foundations of public funding for the arts. Michael Rushton. Palgrave MacMillan

The moral foundations of public funding for the arts. Michael Rushton. Palgrave MacMillan

Do one’s moral foundations impact how they respond to information on climate change emissions? A vehicle choice experiment

Transportation is a major source of climate change emissions. Providing people with better information on those emissions is one means of helping individuals make climate-friendly choices. However, not everyone is influenced by the same type of information. Previous research has demonstrated that Goal Framing Theory could help improve the influence of climate change emissions information and that different framings have different levels of influence depending on a number of socio-demographic and attitudinal characteristics. However, apart from climate change motivation, what other underlying psychological factors might help us understand why the framings vary in their influence between individuals? Moral Foundation Theory (MFT) identifies key values that influence people’s moral decisions, providing a useful framework for understanding diverse responses to information. The objective of this study is to understand whether MFT can help explain different responses by individuals and identify which framings are associated with stronger responses for different moral foundations. This study investigates the moderating effects of moral foundations on individuals’ responsiveness to different emission information framings. Utilizing data from discrete choice experiments involving 2015 Canadian drivers, we examine how different moral foundations impact the willingness-to-pay (WTP) for reducing emissions. The results reveal that the impact of emissions information framing varies significantly according to individuals’ moral foundations. Specifically, moral values associated with Authority, Fairness, and Purity play negative moderating roles on WTP for CO2 emissions under different framings, whereas Ingroup and Harm foundations have positive moderating effects on WTP with the framings tested. Additionally, innovative communication tools like new emojis demonstrated strong positive effects on WTP, especially among those with strong Ingroup, Fairness, and Purity values. Conversely, individuals with a strong Authority value showed the lowest WTP when presented with pressure gauge visuals. Using appropriate framing based on Moral Foundation Theory can considerably change the willingness-to-pay for climate change emissions for different parts of the population, with a notable increase in WTP observed among individuals inclined to alter their behavior. Future framings should incorporate MFT in their design.

Gaming lounges in India afford socially productive gambling: The moral economy and foundations of play in Udaipur, Rajasthan

AbstractWe use ethnographic observations, interviews, and surveys to illuminate video game‐related gambling in India, where players use as currency decorative in‐game weapon covers referred to as skins. We focus on gaming and gambling related to virtual items acquired in the popular shooter game Counter‐Strike: Global Offensive, and our study unfolds among young adults who play in face‐to‐face centers called gaming lounges or zones. We consider how networks of video game players, themselves influenced by familial and societal demands, form moral economies that regulate why video game items are exchanged and how they are evaluated. Further, we use moral foundations theory to clarify ethical plurality in these settings, with tensions between moral demands shaping how and whether skins exchanges are judged to be socially productive or harmful. We show how gaming lounge owners’ personal values, some religiously informed, render emerging adults who play in these settings less at risk of excessive gambling, which is not tolerated either within close‐knit gaming groups or broader society. Overall, our analysis points to the utility of bringing into dialogue moral economy and moral foundations perspectives to uncover the cultural meanings of linked gaming and gambling in this context.

Psychotherapeutic research and practice: Do we need to talk about ‘efficacy’?

ABSTRACT In this article, we address how standardisation in psychotherapeutic research and practice can create a ‘procrustean bed’ which leads to conformity rather than an ethical response to what emerges in the moment. Articulated, three points of conflict in which we discuss how the therapist or researcher may be rendered ‘ineffective’ in the name of ‘efficacy’. We explore some of the implications for idiosyncratic practices in psychotherapy, which are rooted in a foundation of ethics and philosophy, when the paradigm of empirically ‘evidence-based practices’ (EBP), which are rooted in measurement, takes centre stage and are overwhelmingly favoured in the industry of funded therapies. The first point of conflict is in relation to conversation itself; exploring the place of hermeneutics and interpretation within therapeutic dialogue and research. The second point explores what it means to take up a discovery-oriented stance and the implications this has for ‘evidence’; further delving into the way our demand for ‘evidence’ may be impacting how psychotherapeutic research and practice is carried out. The final point aims to explore the infrastructure and work environment of funded therapies in the United Kingdom.

GPT is an effective tool for multilingual psychological text analysis

The social and behavioral sciences have been increasingly using automated text analysis to measure psychological constructs in text. We explore whether GPT, the large-language model (LLM) underlying the AI chatbot ChatGPT, can be used as a tool for automated psychological text analysis in several languages. Across 15 datasets (n = 47,925 manually annotated tweets and news headlines), we tested whether different versions of GPT (3.5 Turbo, 4, and 4 Turbo) can accurately detect psychological constructs (sentiment, discrete emotions, offensiveness, and moral foundations) across 12 languages. We found that GPT (r = 0.59 to 0.77) performed much better than English-language dictionary analysis (r = 0.20 to 0.30) at detecting psychological constructs as judged by manual annotators. GPT performed nearly as well as, and sometimes better than, several top-performing fine-tuned machine learning models. Moreover, GPT's performance improved across successive versions of the model, particularly for lesser-spoken languages, and became less expensive. Overall, GPT may be superior to many existing methods of automated text analysis, since it achieves relatively high accuracy across many languages, requires no training data, and is easy to use with simple prompts (e.g., "is this text negative?") and little coding experience. We provide sample code and a video tutorial for analyzing text with the GPT application programming interface. We argue that GPT and other LLMs help democratize automated text analysis by making advanced natural language processing capabilities more accessible, and may help facilitate more cross-linguistic research with understudied languages.

The Overlooked Influence of Advising and Supporting Upon Leadership in Student Affairs

This study develops and validates a model explaining how the organizational and human resources, advising and supporting, and personal and ethical foundations competencies influence leadership in student affairs. The most notable finding from this study is the overlooked and powerful influence of advising and supporting upon leadership. The results reveal that a key pathway to developing leadership in professionals is to develop their ability to advise and support students, faculty, and other administrators on campus.

Economics and ethics: Is economics a moral science?

The contemporary macroeconomic mainstream has faced substantial scrutiny, particularly from economists with more heterodox perspectives. They argue that its assertion of modern economies operating smoothly along an intertemporal equilibrium path lacks alignment with real-world circumstances. Historical evidence shows that such harmony is rarely the norm. However, the conventional viewpoint is open to diverse criticisms. Is it possible for the field of economics to evade its inherent ethical and moral dimensions? Within macroeconomics, there appears to be an absence of ethical grounding. This article addresses this question.

The Moral and Normative Foundation of Idumi Circumcision Ritual among the Tiriki of Hamisi Sub-County

This paper relates to the moral and normative foundation of Idumi circumcision ritual to explain the reasons for its persistence in many African communities. The main objective of the study was to explore the moral and normative foundation of Idumi circumcision ritual among the Tirikis. The study was guided by Stuarts Hall’s Cultural Identity Theory to explain its persistence and continuity. A qualitative exploratory design which was phenomenological was adopted for the study. Purposeful sampling was utilized to select twenty – six (26) respondents for the study including; four (4) Tiriki elders, four (4) initiates, four (4) ritual leaders, four (4) counselors, four (4) women, four (4) initiation chiefs and two (2) sub-chiefs. Twelve (12) key respondents were interviewed and fourteen (14) respondents participated in two focus group discussions of seven (7) members each. Data was analyzed qualitatively using the thematic method and presented by reporting key findings using appropriate verbatim quotes. The study revealed that there is a moral and normative foundation of Idumi circumcision ritual which contributes to the persistence and continuity of this cultural ritual.

Mapping the moral foundations of the European Union: Why a lack of moral diversity may undermine perceived EU legitimacy.

The stability and effectiveness of supranational organizations, like the European Union (EU), will improve when citizens perceive them as legitimate. Across three studies, two of which were preregistered, and a preregistered pilot study, we combined EU legal expertise with social psychological theory on morality to understand how perceived EU legitimacy is influenced by a sense of moral alignment with the EU. We propose that, currently, the EU gives more weight to values linked to "individualizing" moral foundations (e.g. compassion, social justice, and equality) than to values linked to "binding" moral foundations (e.g. patriotism, religion, and traditionalism). As this may leave people who endorse binding moral foundations feel unrepresented, we investigated whether the EU could gain legitimacy by appealing to values that resonate with binding moral foundations. In study 1, text analyses revealed that the European Commission President's State of the Union speeches indeed appeal more to individualizing than to binding moral foundations. Study 2 (n = 595) provided correlational evidence that the negative relationship between binding moral foundations and perceived EU legitimacy was mediated by lower moral alignment with EU law. Finally, study 3 (n = 567) showed through an experiment that reframing or rebalancing EU law to better align it with binding moral foundations could increase perceived EU legitimacy among people who endorse these moral foundations. The results illustrate the importance of understanding and attending to moral diversity among EU citizens. More generally, our work shows how a collaboration between social psychology and law contributes to safeguarding the legitimacy of supranational organizations.

Quantifying the emergence of moral foundational lexicon in child language development.

Theorists have argued that morality builds on several core modular foundations. When do different moral foundations emerge in life? Prior work has explored the conceptual development of different aspects of morality in childhood. Here, we offer an alternative approach to investigate the developmental emergence of moral foundations through the lexicon, namely the words used to talk about moral foundations. We develop a large-scale longitudinal analysis of the linguistic mentions of five moral foundations (in both virtuous and vicious forms) in naturalistic speech between English-speaking children with ages ranging from 1 to 6 and their caretakers. Using computational methods, we collect a dataset of 1,371 human-annotated moral utterances and automatically annotate around one million utterances in child-caretaker conversations. We discover that in childhood, words for expressing the individualizing moral foundations (i.e. Care/Harm, Fairness/Cheating) tend to emerge earlier and more frequently than words for expressing the binding moral foundations (i.e. Authority/Subversion, Loyalty/Betrayal, Purity/Degradation), and words for Care/Harm are expressed substantially more often than the other foundations. We find significant differences between children and caretakers in how often they talk about Fairness, Cheating, and Degradation. Furthermore, we show that the information embedded in childhood speech allows computational models to predict moral judgment of novel scenarios beyond the scope of child-caretaker conversations. Our work provides a large-scale documentation of the moral foundational lexicon in early linguistic communication in English and forges a new link between moral language development and computational studies of morality.

Traditional family values as an object of state protection, their significance in shaping the spiritual and moral foundations of russian society

The article deals with modern trends in the development of our state, the need for the formation of its spiritual and moral foundations, taking into account traditional family values. Family, marriage, children are defined as the fundamental family values of every person, the protection of which is of fundamental importance for the preservation of the Russian people. The article presents theoretical research aimed at determining the legal and social essence of traditional values, their system is presented, their system-forming significance for the legislation of the Russian Federation is determined. The author proves that the continuity of family values, their universality and irrefutability, the transfer of their ideological essence from generation to generation, will protect future generations from moral destruction, preserve the historical identity of our people, which will determine the further development and prosperity of our state.

Book Review: Nature and Command: On the Metaphysical Foundations of Morality by J. Caleb Clanton and Kraig Martin

Book Review: <i>Nature and Command: On the Metaphysical Foundations of Morality</i> by J. Caleb Clanton and Kraig Martin

How the Values and Moral Foundations of Management Researchers Differ from Those of Managers

How the Values and Moral Foundations of Management Researchers Differ from Those of Managers

Exploring Team Efficiency and Creativity Under Moral Leadership: A Moral Foundations Perspective

Exploring Team Efficiency and Creativity Under Moral Leadership: A Moral Foundations Perspective

Emotional AI in education and toys: Investigating moral risk awareness in the acceptance of AI technologies from a cross-sectional survey of the Japanese population

Emotional artificial intelligence (AI), i.e., affective computing technologies, is rapidly reshaping the education of young minds worldwide. In Japan, government and commercial stakeholders are promulgating emotional AI not only as a neoliberal, cost-saving benefit but also as a heuristic that can improve the learning experience at home and in the classroom. Nevertheless, critics warn of a myriad of risks and harms posed by the technology such as privacy violation, unresolved deeper cultural and systemic issues, machinic parentalism as well as the danger of imposing attitudinal conformity. This study brings together the Technological Acceptance Model and Moral Foundation Theory to examine the cultural construal of risks and rewards regarding the application of emotional AI technologies. It explores Japanese citizens’ perceptions of emotional AI in education and children's toys via analysis of a final sample of 2000 Japanese respondents with five age groups (20s–60s) and two sexes equally represented. The linear regression models for determinants of attitude toward emotional AI in education and in toys account for 44 % and 38 % variation in the data, respectively. The analyses reveal a significant negative correlation between attitudes toward emotional AI in both schools and toys and concerns about privacy violations or the dystopian nature of constantly monitoring of children and students’ emotions with AI (Education: βDystopianConcern = − .094***; Toys: βPrivacyConcern = − .199***). However, worries about autonomy and bias show mixed results, which hints at certain cultural nuances of values in a Japanese context and how new the technologies are. Concurring with the empirical literature on the Moral Foundation Theory, the chi-square (Χ2) test shows Japanese female respondents express more fear regarding the potential harms of emotional AI technologies for the youth's privacy, autonomy, data misuse, and fairness (p < 0.001). The policy implications of these results and insights on the impacts of emotional AI for the future of human-machine interaction are also provided.