Moral Foundations Theory Research Articles

Morality analysis: Reducing moral backlash to public policy

AbstractWidely used policy development processes rarely systematically consider differing moral values, which can lead to overlooked risks, ineffective communications and suboptimal policy design. This article introduces morality analysis, a policy tool that draws on moral foundations theory to optimize policy and program design, build public support for policies and present key advice to decision‐makers. Morality analysis is used to examine the case of a controversial vaccination incentive program introduced by the Government of Alberta in late 2021 and identify policy options that would likely have prompted less public backlash. This article suggests that morality analysis should supplement the policy analysis toolkit.

Effects of Moral Frames Within Vaping Prevention Messages on Current smokers’ Support for Electronic Cigarette Regulations

Given the rise of communication campaigns to prevent and reduce the use of electronic nicotine delivery systems among minors nationwide, it is important to examine whether certain preventive messages will spill over to affect current adult smokers’ support for and compliance with vaping regulations. Drawing upon the Moral Foundations Theory, the current study experimentally examined the effects of moral frames on current adult smokers’ support for vape-free policies and marketing restrictions. An online sample of current smokers (N = 630) was randomly assigned to a 3 (moral frames in vaping prevention : care, purity, non-moral control) × 2 (priming of anti-smoking messages: yes or no) between-subject survey experiment. Compared with non-moral framed messages, smokers exposed to both care and purity framed messages were more likely to support vape-free policies in public places. Such effects were stronger for smokers with higher pre-treatment endorsement of the purity value, driven less by anger or disgust but more by smokers’ updating of both self-oriented and secondhand harm perceptions. Moral frames, especially those appealing to care and purity moral values, are thus promising messaging strategies for vaping prevention communication campaigns in terms of increasing current smokers’ support for vape-free policies. The results also help improve our understanding of the moral roots of health policy opinions and the potential of deploying moral framing to improve message design for health campaigns.

Moral framing and issue-based framing of #StopAsianHate campaigns on Twitter

Guided by moral foundation theory (MFT), this study examines #StopAsianHate messages on Twitter to identify the main narratives surrounding the campaign. It also aims to unpack how moral framing and strategic narratives are related to online engagement size in social justice campaigns. Mixed methods were used to analyze the sampled tweets, including computational approaches based on the extended Moral Foundations Dictionary, structural topic modeling, and hurdle negative binomial regression. The findings show that moral framing is related to a message’s likelihood of receiving likes or retweets on Twitter. Overall, moral framing using virtue values is positively related to the chance of a tweet being retweeted or liked, while vice framing has mixed effects on user engagement. Issue-based framing by zooming in on specific topics helps to avoid zero likes or retweets but does not encourage engagement. We also discuss the implications of these results on how to leverage moral framing and strategic narratives to raise awareness of social injustice.

What Does Morality Have to Do with It? What Haidt and Moral Foundation Theory Reveals about White Evangelical Christian Women Who Advocate for Politician Donald J. Trump

This qualitative research offers an explanatory framework to identify potential moral motives evangelical Christian women demonstrate when championing Donald J. Trump, who defies biblical morality. Through focus groups and in-depth semi-structured interviews and utilizing Haidt’s Moral Foundation Theory (MFT), which hypothesizes that conservatives rely on all five of his moral value pairings in their moral implementation. This study juxtaposes whether MFT pairing references are applied when evangelical white Christian women expound on their admiration for the politician, Donald J. Trump. The findings from this study suggest that MFT verbiage accounts for a considerable amount of moral rationale from the participants, who consider their religious faith to be first and foremost in their lives when discussing politics and their political viewpoints. Their discussions and answers touch on all five of Haidt’s moral value pairings. These conservative Christian women’s long-established sanctified realm of religion, family, and the sovereign state hold firm in today’s political debate.

Comparative moral principles: justifications, values, and foundations

The article compares three influential theories used in sociology and psychology to categorize types of morality—Luc Boltanski & Laurent Thévenot’s justification theory, Shalom H. Schwartz’s basic human values theory, and Jonathan Haidt’s moral foundations theory—to simplify the complexity presented by three different categorizations, while retaining necessary nuance, and to translate the concepts of each into the language of the other two. A comparative table is presented to evaluate which categories of the three theories correspond to each other and where do theories make distinctions that are lacking from the other two. This summary framework of Comparative Moral Principles (CMP) consists of eight principles to compare, explain, and interpret practices of moral motivation and meaning-making: Liberty, Inspiration, Safety, Community, Care, Equality, Deservingness, and Competition.

Sharing is in fact about caring: Care concerns feature prominently in subreddits devoted to self-injurious thoughts and behaviors

ObjectiveGiven poor treatment efficacy and utilization for self-injurious thoughts and behaviors (SITBs) and the pervasive SITB-stigma present in many treatment settings, research that identifies values and experiences that resonate with individuals engaged in SITBs is urgently needed to improve current treatment offerings. The present study uses Moral Foundations Theory, a leading framework for conceptualizing values and behavior, to identify responses to SITBs most likely to resonate with those who have lived SITB experience. MethodsNatural language processing methods (topic modeling, neural network-based classifier) were used to extract latent conversation topics and moral concerns from 1.68 M messages on the two largest SITB forums on Reddit. Once conversation topics and moral concerns were extracted, a linear regression model was fit to describe the relationship between likes on Reddit, moral concerns, and latent conversation topics. ResultsFindings revealed several types of messages most likely to resonate with individuals engaged in SITBs: 1) Specific situational narratives compared to general messages of sadness (p < .01); 2) messages that expressed care (p < .001); and 3) specific messages that expressed care, fairness, loyalty, and purity. ConclusionsSpecific, care-focused content (kind, nurturing content that discusses avoidance of emotional/physical harm to others) resonates most with individuals engaged in SITBs, providing insight to the real-time needs and experiences of those engaged in SITBs and suggesting the importance of framing SITB interventions in care language rather than success/failure language. Study findings may inform one-on-one clinical interactions, the development of SITB-specific interventions, and SITB training for clinicians.

Теория моральных оснований: современный взгляд на психологические факторы политических убеждений

&lt;p style="text-align: justify;"&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Objective. &lt;/strong&gt;The research is aimed at analyzing of the main achievements of Moral Foundations Theory in the study of problems of political psychology, as well as at reviewing its criticism and limitations.&lt;br&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Background.&amp;nbsp;&lt;/strong&gt;In recent years, the problem of the psychological origins of political orientations and views has attracted considerable attention of researchers, due to the practical significance of predicting election results and preventing the manipulation of voters' opinions in democratic countries. One of the most popular and productive modern approaches explaining the psychological factors of political orientations is Moral Foundations Theory. The article discusses the key ideas of this theory in the studies of problems of political psychology, describes the methods developed and the results achieved. Special attention is paid to criticism of Moral Foundations Theory and empirical studies demonstrating its weaknesses and limitations.&lt;br&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conclusions.&amp;nbsp;&lt;/strong&gt;The studies show that conservative or liberal political orientations, and right or left views are associated with moral foundations, but these facts are found predominantly in Western countries. This conclusion is well supported by the results of Moral Foundations Questionnaire, however, the assessment of moral foundations using content analysis shows significantly lower correlations. Moral foundations also play an important role for intergroup relations, demonstrating associations with tolerance towards various groups and support for a hard or peaceful foreign policy. The prospects for further research within this approach include the improvement of instruments, the expansion of research in different cultures and a more careful consideration of the context in which the consequences of moral foundations are investigated.&lt;/p&gt;

Modeling nationalism, religiosity, and threat perception: During the COVID-19 pandemic.

The rise of nationalism and populism in Europe has created significant political and policy challenges. Understanding and addressing these challenges will require attention to the psychological mechanisms and social dynamics that have engendered and promoted these societal shifts. This article presents the results of two new empirical studies that attempt to shed light on the relationships between nationalism, religiosity, national and religious identification, threat perception, and sentiment toward different groups. Informed by identity fusion theory and moral foundations theory, Study 1 collected and analysed survey data on these topics. Study 2 utilized the results of Study 1 to construct a system dynamics model in which causal propositions and links are added to the variables, creating an artificial society within which hypotheses about these dynamics can be tested. Both the survey and the simulation suggest that nationalism and religion are affected by the same variables. As such, religion might not be a cause of nationalism (or nationalism the cause of religion), but they could be correlated because of mutual causation.

Automatic assignment of moral foundations to movies by word embedding

Morality is a topic that people are increasingly concerned about. Morality is observed and measured during public acts or when developing and consuming products, such as movies. The Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) was developed to rigorously perform these measurements with the support of the Moral Foundations Dictionary (MFD). In this paper, a Word Embedding-based Moral Foundation Assignment (WEMFA) approach has been designed, implemented, and applied to the movie domain for multiple assignment of moral foundations. WEMFA may use any dictionary, and it has been applied to a movie collection generated from movie synopses. A comparison between WEMFA and MoralStrength, the only approach found in the scientific literature, has been carried out. The proposed approach provided a percentage improvement of 41.7% with respect to the best version of MoralStrength, which uses an extension of the original MFD almost 10 times larger in number of terms. In addition, an extension of the original MFD (MFD24) has been built by adding 14 new moral foundations to the 10 original ones, enriching the moral context. WEMFA provided a mean accuracy of 78% with MFD24 despite the increment of the number of moral foundations. Besides, new extended dictionaries or even totally different ones can be used with WEMFA, since it does not need any training.

State Public Health Communications and Public Compliance during the Pre-election SARS-CoV-2 Pandemic: Interpreting the Effectiveness of Messaging Guidelines Utilizing Moral Foundations Theory

Background: State-level public health messaging during the pre-election coronavirus pandemic was very inconsistent. Moral motivational content of the messages, as characterized by moral foundations theory, may have contributed to the degree of compliance in particular states. More attention to this content might result in greater compliance and a lessening of the pandemic's severity. Methods: A comprehensive review of official state messaging in six U.S. states (California, Florida, Massachusetts, Mississippi, New York, and Texas) was reviewed for the number and distribution of moral foundations as described by moral foundations theory. A search was done for state-level data concerning compliance with mask-wearing and social distancing, the primary public precautionary measures during the pandemic. Rates of compliance by the state were compared with messaging content and analyzed for associations and correlations with the known partisan leanings of the states. Examples of messages with balanced moral foundations, which might be prospectively employed for greater acceptance, were presented. All data were gathered prior to the introduction of the first available vaccine. Results: Message review and compliance data suggested that the quantity and proportion of coronavirus-related official messages and the utilization of a balanced combination of moral foundations were associated with higher levels of compliance with the recommended public health measures and lower infection rates. The political orientations of states did not align with the use of known conservative/liberal preferred moral foundations as previously established by Moral Foundations Theory. Conclusion: Adjusting messaging with attention to the balanced employment of moral foundations can lead to wider acceptance of and compliance with preventive public health measures.

The Moral Foundations of Left-Wing Authoritarianism: On the Character, Cohesion, and Clout of Tribal Equalitarian Discourse

Abstract Left-wing authoritarianism remains far less understood than right-wing authoritarianism. We contribute to literature on the former, which typically relies on surveys, using a new social media analytic approach. We use a list of 60 terms to provide an exploratory sketch of the outlines of a political ideology – tribal equalitarianism – with origins in 19th and 20th century social philosophy. We then use analyses of the English Corpus of Google Books (n &gt; 8 million books) and scraped unique tweets from Twitter (n = 202,582) to conduct a series of investigations to discern the extent to which this ideology is cohesive amongst the public, reveals signatures of authoritarianism and has been growing in popularity. Though exploratory, our results provide some evidence of left-wing authoritarianism in two forms: (1) a uniquely conservative signature amongst ostensible liberals using measures derived from Moral Foundations Theory and (2) a substantial prevalence of anger, relative to anxiety or sadness, in tweets analyzed for sentiment. In general, results indicate that this worldview is growing in popularity, is increasingly cohesive, and shows signatures of authoritarianism.

Moral Reactions to Sexual Relationships that Violate Age Norms

ABSTRACT We examined whether Moral Foundations Theory helps explain Americans’ reactions to violations of age-related sexual norms. Attitudes toward sexual relationships between two adolescents, an adolescent and a young adult, and two adults of highly discrepant ages were obtained from a nationally representative sample of 1,117 adults in the United States. The sex of the older person was manipulated in the age-discrepant scenarios. We found that respondents for whom purity was an important value were generally more likely to be bothered by these sexual activities. The reaction to sexual relationships between adolescent girls and young men was an exception. For this type of relationship, the negative reaction was related to the fairness foundation, suggesting that respondents thought the relationship involved exploitation. Reactions to violations of age norms were unrelated to whether respondents had a strong harm foundation, suggesting that their reactions were not motivated by concern that such relationships are harmful to participants. Finally, we found that male respondents were less likely to react negatively to age violations than female respondents, particularly when the sexual relationship involved an adolescent boy and a young woman.

Moral Common Sense: Examining the False Consensus Effect of Morality in Japan

Researchers have continually studied the classical false consensus effect (FCE) and documented its robustness across specific contexts. Under the influence of the FCE, people create an illusory perception of others around them and maintain this perception, believing that own opinion serves as &amp;ldquo;common sense.&amp;rdquo; Because shared morality plays an important role in group contexts, people&amp;rsquo;s (illusory) perceptions about how much their morality is shared should be clarified. Therefore, the present study investigated the presence of the FCE in the domain of morality based on the Moral Foundations Theory (MFT). The pilot study required participants to rank the five moral foundations according to their perceived level of importance and estimate others&amp;rsquo; perceived importance of the same five foundations. The Purity foundation of the MFT was not sufficient to identify Japanese values on religion and cleanliness. Thus, the main study supplemented the pilot study with the Purity Orientation&amp;ndash;Pollution Avoidance Scale (POPA). The importance given to the moral foundations among participants in the main study was measured using both the Moral Foundations Questionnaire (MFQ) and the POPA. The results from both studies showed that the FCE occurs in the moral domain among Japanese individuals. Furthermore, the use of the POPA in addition to the MFQ can benefit future research on morality in cultures that are not Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic such as Japan. The present research will contribute significantly to further understanding the role of morality in group contexts.

Moral Intuitions About Stigmatizing Practices and Feeding Stigmatizing Practices: How Haidt's Moral Foundations Theory Relates to Infectious Disease Stigma.

Despite extensive stigma mitigation efforts, infectious disease stigma remains common. So far, little attention has been paid to the moral psychology of stigmatizing practices (i.e. beliefs, attitudes, actions) rather than the experience of being stigmatized. Addressing the moral psychology behind stigmatizing practices seems necessary to explain the persistence of infectious disease stigma and to develop effective mitigation strategies. Our article proposes building on Jonathan Haidt's moral foundations theory, which states that moral judgements follow from intuitions rather than conscious reasoning. Conceptual analysis was conducted to show how Haidt's five moral foundations can be connected to (i) moral judgements about stigmatizing practices and (ii) stigmatizing practices themselves. We found that care/harm, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal and sanctity/degradation intuitions can inform moral judgements about stigmatizing practices. Loyalty/betrayal and sanctity/degradation intuitions can sometimes also feed stigmatizing practices. Authority/subversion intuitions can inform moral judgements and stigmatizing practices towards people who disrespect authoritative rules meant to protect public health. Moral dumbfounding and posthoc reasoning might explain the persistence of stigmatizing practices. In conclusion, this study demonstrates the relevance of Haidt's approach to infectious disease stigma research and mitigation strategies. We hope that this study motivates researchers to further test and assess this approach.

Morally motivated public service: An empirical examination of the moral theory of public service motivation

We empirically examine the moral theory of Public Service Motivation (PSM) with data from a large online Dutch household panel. Inspired by Moral Foundation Theory, we develop and test several hypotheses on the role of moral foundations in shaping PSM, as well as the behavioral implications regarding participation in social organizations. The individualizing foundations of Care and Fairness (jointly referred to as INDV) are found to positively relate to all four dimensions of PSM—Compassion (COM), Self-Sacrifice (SS), Attraction to Public Service (APS), and Commitment to Public Values (CPV). Moreover, PSM mediates the positive relationship between INDV and participation in humanitarian and environmental organizations. Sanctity is positively correlated with SS and APS, mediating the often-observed relationship between PSM and religious activities. Loyalty is significantly and positively associated with SS, with the correlations with other PSM dimensions being gender-specific. Authority is significantly and negatively related to COM, SS, and APS. Overall, we provide empirical evidence on the influential role of moral foundations in engendering PSM and its behavioral consequences.

Moral rhetoric in discrete choice models: a Natural Language Processing approach

This paper proposes a new method to combine choice- and text data to infer moral motivations from people’s actions. To do this, we rely on moral rhetoric, in other words, extracting moral values from verbal expressions with Natural Language Processing techniques. We use moral rhetoric based on a well-established moral, psychological theory called Moral Foundations Theory. We use moral rhetoric as input in Discrete Choice Models to gain insights into moral behaviour based on people’s words and actions. We test our method in a case study of voting and party defection in the European Parliament. Our results indicate that moral rhetoric have significant explanatory power in modelling voting behaviour. We interpret the results in the light of political science literature and propose ways for future investigations.

A Randomized Experiment on the Effects of Moral Appeals on U.S. Parents’ Intentions to Vaccinate Their 5e11-Year-Old Children Against COVID-19

Background: Democrats and Republicans in the United States were divided on their COVID-related risk perceptions and their adoption of preventive measures (e.g., getting vaccinated). Based on moral foundations theory and the matching hypothesis, this study hypothesized that parents with a Democratic affiliation would be persuaded by messages featuring a harm/care or a fairness moral appeal, whereas parents with a Republican affiliation would be persuaded by messages featuring an authority or ingroup loyalty appeal.

Toward an Ethical Framework for Smart Cities and the Internet of Things

As smart cities increasingly become real, an ethical framework for them becomes increasingly necessary. Surprisingly, current approaches largely disregard such a framework and concentrate primarily on challenges pertaining to the data lifecycle. However, a smart city involves much more than data gathering: it involves the interactions of residents, businesses, and government agencies with respect to public and private resources subject to potentially subtle regulations and other norms. This article introduces a sociotechnical view of smart cities and shows how it may be profitably mapped to the moral foundation theory to provide a comprehensive ethical framework.

Moving from is to ought: the relation between primals and moral foundations

ABSTRACT Primal world beliefs theoretically operate outside of conscious awareness, influencing perception, appraisals of stimuli, and behaviours. Moral foundations theory proposes that intuitions are the primary determinants of moral decisions. Existing research suggests an important role for religiosity in influencing morality. In this online study of 271 Christians, we hypothesised the primals would predict moral foundations above and beyond the variance accounted for by religiosity. Our results indicate that a belief that the world is alive is the primary primal correlate of moral foundations; a belief that the world is enticing was also related to the moral foundations of care and loyalty. Our results also confirmed the important roles of intrinsic religiosity and fundamentalism found in previous studies. This study demonstrates the importance of primal beliefs in predicting moral foundations, even after accounting for the effects of religiosity. We discuss the implications for decreasing polarization and for future research.

Evil joy is hard to share: Negative affect attenuates interpersonal capitalizing on immoral deeds.

Capitalization is an interpersonal process in which individuals (capitalizers) communicate their accomplishments to others (responders). When these attempts to capitalize are met with enthusiastic responses, individuals reap greater personal and social benefits from the accomplishment. This research integrated the interpersonal model of capitalization with moral foundations theory to examine whether accomplishments achieved through immoral (vs. moral) means disrupt the interpersonal processes of capitalization. We hypothesized that an accomplishment achieved through immoral (vs. moral) means would suppress the positive affective response often reaped from capitalizing on good news. We conducted two, mixed-methods experiments in which individuals interacted with a stranger (Study 1) or with their romantic partner (Study 2). We found that responders exhibited greater self-reported negative emotions, avoidance motivation, and arousal when reacting to capitalizers' immoral (vs. moral) accomplishments. In turn, greater negative affect predicted less enthusiastic verbal responses to capitalization attempts. In Study 2 we found that immoral accomplishments increased avoidance motivation, which contrary to our expectations, increased expressions of happiness. These studies reveal that the moral means by which accomplishments are achieved can disrupt the interpersonal process of capitalization. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).