Moral Framing Research Articles

Finding Resonance Amid Trauma: Moral Injury and the Role of Religion Among Christian Post-9/11 U.S. Veterans

AbstractRecent scholarship examines the relationship between moral injury and religion but rarely analyzes social processes at work therein. This article uses data from interviews with 47 post-9/11 veterans who once or currently identified as Christian to explore how religious beliefs and practices preempt, mitigate, or exacerbate moral injury. While many veterans experienced potentially morally injurious events, the differences between those with moral injury and those without depended on whether they could find resonance with meaning-making toolkits amid trauma. Dissonance stirred by incoherence in one’s moral narrative and betrayal of significant relationships spurred manifestations of moral injury. Those who achieved resonance relied on religious moral frames they brought with them or those supplied by military culture, or they engaged in explicit moral deliberation. This study reveals a complex process of belief maintenance during moral crises that extends and challenges previous examinations of culture in action, resonance, and moral injury.

Constructing ‘the people’ of populism: a critique of the ideational approach from a discursive perspective

ABSTRACT This article takes as its starting point the consensus among scholars regarding the core characteristics of populism, namely the centrality of ‘the people’ and an antagonistic view of society that pits the former against an elite. It suggests that the assumption found in the ideational approach, that populism constructs a homogeneous and morally pure people is problematic and may lead to analytical and normative bias, as it equates populism with anti-pluralism and illiberalism. The article starts with surveying the language games involved in the construction of ‘the people’ in democratic modernity. It then reconstructs the key principles of the ideational and the discursive approaches to populism, highlighting how the latter offers a more robust framework for understanding how populism creates a sense of unity among heterogeneous demands, without necessarily resulting in homogeneity, while problematizing moral framings. Several empirical cases of populist mobilization are surveyed to provide empirical grounding to the argument. The author's suggestion is not to dismiss the ideational approach, but rather to revise the homogeneity and morality theses, opening up the possibility of conceiving of ‘the people’ in terms of unity and understanding the latter’s antagonism towards the ‘elite’ in terms of politics.

Arrangements, Semiotic Links and Evaluations: Purifying the Familiar Environments from COVID-19 Among Serbia’s Young Professionals

Our research principally engages with the issue of encounters with COVID-19 within an everyday frame, underlining how the restoration of a “distorted” familiar environment occurs through gradual coping with such a mysterious non-human entity. The specific objective of our project was to discern how 20 young professionals from Belgrade (Serbia), whom we interviewed during the curfew, encountered, re-organized, and eventually re-settled into their common, everyday spaces and routines, while the virus was spreading in the background. Our examination first seeks to register how the distorted relationality of humans with a non-human entity – which the virus is – became distilled into everyday objectivity. More profoundly, we intended to seek understanding of what alternations the possibility of getting infected were associated with common, everyday arrangements, and how the actors pursued hygienic “purification” as a principal task. In this sense, we managed to unveil that – albeit this interplay with an invisible and rather mysterious non-human entity involved a number of confusing moments – the latter was ultimately stabilized within a specific evaluative and cognitive format that dictated the former’s actions. Being highly appreciative of domestic familiarity and intending to quite reflexively purify potentially contaminated zones and objects, our respondents also pursued a specific moral frame. In conclusion, we underline how these “purifying” actions were substantially guided by a desire to maintain the domestic order of familiarity and immediate care.

The Rise of the Anti-Gender Movement in Croatia and the 2013 Marriage Referendum

This study uses the 2013 Croatian marriage referendum to show how anti-gender activists successfully reframed LGBT rights and emerged as influential political actors. Our examination of newspaper LGBT frames in the period 2002–2013 situates the referendum framing in its broader discursive field. Our analysis shows that anti-gender activists negotiated new resonance for ‘old’ socially conservative issues by appropriating the human rights frame and eroding its credibility, and by seeming to disassociate themselves from morality frames. Our findings contribute to the literature on anti-gender mobilisations in Europe by identifying new framing strategies used by anti-gender actors in their efforts to bring about wider policy and societal changes.

Framing the Trump Administration’s “Zero Tolerance” Policy: A Quantitative Content Analysis of News Stories and Visuals in US News Websites

ABSTRACT A quantitative content analysis was employed to study how websites of newspapers (The New York Times, Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal) and cable news (CNN, MSNBC, Fox News) framed the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy in stories (N = 477) and visuals (N = 501). Overall, Attribution of responsibility was the most used frame and the news content was much more thematic then episodic, with the exception of the Human interest frame. The New York Times and the Washington Post used more frequently the Morality frame, while CNN and MSNBC had more Human interest stories and The Wall Street Journal focus more on the Economic frame. Crime was prominent only on Fox News. The visuals predominantly focused on immigrants in shelters and children stopped at the border, and they portrayed more negative than positive emotions. Fox News was the only news outlet to publish images of immigrants trying to force the border and to release more visuals of men alone. CNN and MSNBC used more frequently images of immigrants looking directly at the camera. Surprisingly, The New York Times, whose stories criticized the policy, published the lowest number of images portraying children behind bars.

Gender Differences and Unfairness Processing during Economic and Moral Decision-Making: A fNIRS Study.

Decisional conflicts have been investigated with social decision-making tasks, which represent good models to elicit social and emotional dynamics, including fairness perception. To explore these issues, we created two modified versions of the UG framed within an economic vs. a moral context that included two kinds of unfair offers: advantageous (upside, U) or disadvantageous (downside, D) from the responder’s perspective, and vice-versa for the proponent. The hemodynamic activity of 36 participants, 20 females and 16 males, was continuously recorded with fNIRS to investigate the presence of general or specific circuits between the different experimental conditions. Results showed that disadvantageous offers (D) are associated with an increased widespread cortical activation. Furthermore, we found that advantageous moral choices at the expense of others (U) were related to the activation of the right prefrontal cortex. Finally, we found gender-related differences in brain activations in the different frameworks. In particular, the DLPFC was recruited by females during the economic task, and by males during the moral frame. In conclusion, the present study confirmed and expanded previous data about the role of the prefrontal cortices in decision-making, suggesting the need for further studies to understand better the different prefrontal networks serving moral and economic decisions also considering gender-related differences.

Moral Framing and Mechanisms Influence Public Willingness to Optimize Cognition

Scientists, clinicians, and the public aim to optimize cognition using numerous techniques. While drugs and education have become mainstays in the public and professional practice, brain stimulation is rapidly emerging. The public reports some concerns about brain stimulation used to optimize cognition. In our prior work using hypothetical vignettes involving brain stimulation, the moral acceptability of specific uses was only somewhat related to the public’s willingness to administer brain stimulation to influence a given cognitive function. Notably, whether the moral framing influences willingness to optimize cognition with various mechanisms is unknown. Here, we randomly assigned subjects to one of four mechanism vignette conditions: education, drugs, invasive brain stimulation, and noninvasive brain stimulation. Within each mechanism, subjects were assigned to think morally either before or after reporting their willingness to optimize specific cognitive functions in others. Across 1328 subjects, we found that thinking morally reduced the public’s willingness to optimize cognition overall. Moreover, willingness decreased the most in invasive and noninvasive brain stimulation. Encouraging moral reasoning uniquely reduces openness to using brain stimulation among other ways to optimize cognition. Studying how specific moral concerns drive public hesitancy about brain stimulation could suggest avenues for education and ethical discourse.

News framing of the Euromaidan protests in the hybrid regime and the liberal democracy: Comparison of Russian and UK news media

This study examines and compares news framing of the protests in Ukraine from 30 November 2013 to 26 February 2014, encompassing three news sectors in the hybrid regime setting of Russia and the liberal democracy of the UK. Following Godefroidt et al.’s (2016) approach in their article in International Communication Gazette 78(8), the findings suggest that, while the Russian media used economic consequences and morality frames in the reporting of the protests reflecting the country’s political rhetoric on Ukraine, the British media preferred a human-interest frame and delivered a primarily one-sided coverage. The confrontational interpretations of the crisis by the Russian and UK media revealed an illiberal trend in both the hybrid regime and the liberal democracy.

The benefits and perils of job candidates’ signaling their morality in selection decisions

AbstractIn this research, we challenge the belief that positive signals of morality always increase job candidates’ appeal to interviewers. In four experiments with both experienced and novice interviewers, we find that signals of the candidates’ morality interact with the nature of the industry such that candidates who send signals of morality are less likely to be selected for jobs in a morally tainted industry, compared to neutral candidates. Moderated mediation analyses indicate that this effect is driven by a perceived lack of job fit (Experiments 1 and 2). Results of Experiment 3 indicate that this moderation effect is limited to candidates who signal morality—candidates applying for jobs in morally tainted industries who signal immorality do not enjoy a competitive advantage over moral or morally neutral candidates. Finally, the framing of the organization, that is, whether critical aspects of the organization are presented as more morally or economically oriented, within morally tainted industries helps mitigate the penalizing effects interviewers put on candidates who signal their morality—a moral frame eliminates this negative effect whereas an economic frame does not (Experiment 4). Together, these studies indicate that a job candidate's morality is a complicated and important quality that can profoundly affect his/her ratings of hireability.

Promoting reconciliation in separatist conflict: The effect of morality framing

In separatist conflict, the majority group and the separatist group alternate in their roles as victim and perpetrator. We examined how framing prior ingroup wrongdoings in terms of violations of moral ideals or violations of moral obligations affects the majority’s willingness to reconcile with the separatist group. We conducted a field experiment ( N = 208) in the Republic of Indonesia, where separatist conflict is rife. As expected, among members of the majority who were high in national identification, a moral ideals violation frame produced stronger positive intergroup orientations (e.g., perspective-taking, intergroup trust) and collective emotions of guilt and shame, whereas a moral obligations violation frame produced stronger positive intergroup orientations and collective emotions among low identifiers. In turn, positive intergroup orientations and collective emotions promoted reconciliatory attitudes (e.g., willingness to apologise, support for intergroup cooperation). These findings suggest that policymakers can gain a better insight into the effect of framing ingroup wrongdoings as violations of either moral ideals or moral obligations when taking national identification into account.

Classifying public policies with Moral Foundations Theory

Morality policy researchers have long grappled with the difficulty of determining objective or empirical criteria for classifying policies with moral content. A newer, but related, critique has suggested that we cannot classify morality policies by their substantive content, because policy debates employ moral frames for strategic purposes. This paper joins this debate by using Moral Foundations Theory to conduct quantitative content analyses of the supporting and opposing arguments in Voter Guides that accompanied referenda on enacting (1) the death penalty, (2) same-sex marriage, (3) physician-assisted suicide, (4) Official English, (5) recreational marijuana, (6) medical marijuana, (7) abortion funding bans, (8) tribal gaming, (9) minimum wage increase, (10) Right to Work legislation, and (11) property tax limits. MFT quantitative content analysis shows that frames with ostensibly instrumental arguments hold moral content. Our findings endorse the argument that researchers should differentiate between pure and mixed morality policies and other non-morality policies with decidedly less moral content.

Dynamic Transactions Between News Frames and Sociopolitical Events: An Integrative, Hidden Markov Model Approach

Abstract A central goal of news research is to understand the interplay between news coverage and sociopolitical events. Although a great deal of work has elucidated how events drive news coverage, and how in turn news coverage influences societal outcomes, integrative systems-level models of the reciprocal interchanges between these two processes are sparse. Herein, we present a macro-scale investigation of the dynamic transactions between news frames and events using Hidden Markov Models (HMMs), focusing on morally charged news frames and sociopolitical events. Using 3,501,141 news records discussing 504,759 unique events, we demonstrate that sequences of frames and events can be characterized in terms of “hidden states” containing distinct moral frame and event relationships, and that these “hidden states” can forecast future news frames and events. This work serves to construct a path toward the integrated study of the news-event cycle across multiple research domains.

Affective subjectivation or moral ambivalence? Constraints on the promotion of sustainable tourism by academic researchers

This paper examines an increasingly pervasive aspect of neoliberal research funding regimes, namely the expectation that academic research should influence non-academic policy and practice. More specifically, it explores the reaction of British academic researchers with an interest in sustainable tourism to what has become known as the impact agenda. How do they conceptualise impact? Do they moralise impact (perhaps in relation to the limits of their expertise or the veracity of their claims)? Does this aspect of research policy affect their approach to academic work? The findings of a qualitative study reveal a constituency of academic researchers primarily concerned with their own performativity. There is seemingly limited moral framing of research impact and a suggestion of moral hypocrisy. Widespread affective subjectivation provides a plausible explanation for current academic behaviour. The paper concludes by arguing that without a collective re-thinking of how sustainable tourism research might gain influence beyond academia, it is probable that performative practices will continue to characterise academic responses to the impact agenda.

The discursive construction of the moral and legal statuses of fansubbers in the Chinese press 2006–2018

Fansubbers (short for “fan subtitlers”) are confronted with a moral-legal dilemma in China. On the one hand, they are highly appreciated by the general public because they work without pay and altruistically provide free access to subtitled audiovisual contents that are otherwise unavailable. On the other hand, they distribute unlicensed contents and violate the copyright law in China. Their practices cause damages to copyright holders and thus call for legal actions. Given the conflicting moral and legal statuses, it is necessary to understand how the Chinese press frame and represent fansubbers, as the media play a crucial role in shaping people’s opinions. Drawing on a one-million-word corpus of news reports between 2006 and 2018, this study examines the media frames, discourse topics, and representations about fansubbers in China. Based on keyword, collocation, and concordance analyses, four discourse topics were identified: sharing, volunteerism, copyright, and commercialization. The former two pointed to a moral frame, while the latter two fed into a legal frame. The diachronic analysis demonstrated that the topic of sharing was most prominent in eight of 13 years, while the topic of copyright spiked about every five years. The corpus findings also unravel the complexities of discursive strategies in two aspects: (a) representational strategies work in combination to selectively frame fansubbers and (b) the same discursive strategies can simultaneously moralize and delegitimize fansubbers. This study sheds light on the multifaceted, dynamic, and complex nature of media representations about fansubbers with a conflicting social position.

What Drives Hyper-Partisan News Sharing: Exploring the Role of Source, Style, and Content

A growing number of hyper-partisan alternative media outlets have sprung up online to challenge mainstream journalism. However, research on news sharing in this particular media environment is lacking. Based on the virality of seventeen partisan outlets’ coverage of immigration and using the latest computational linguistic algorithm, the present study probes how hyper-partisan news sharing is related to source transparency, content styles, and moral framing. The study finds that the most shared articles reveal author names, but not necessarily other types of author information. The study uncovers a salient link between moral frames and virality. In particular, audiences are more sensitive to moral frames that emphasize authority/respect, fairness/reciprocity, and harm/care.

Measuring moral politics: How strict and nurturant family values explain individual differences in conservatism, liberalism, and the political middle.

Individuals' political stances tend to place them into the conservative "right," the liberal "left," or the moderate "middle." What might explain this pattern of division? Moral Politics Theory (Lakoff, 1996) holds that political attitudes arise from moral worldviews that are conceptually anchored in contrasting family models-the strict-father and nurturant-parent models-while the political middle is morally "biconceptual," endorsing both models simultaneously. The present research examined these postulations empirically. Studies 1 and 2 tested the conceptual and predictive validity of the theorized models by developing an instrument assessing strict and nurturant parenting beliefs (the Moral Politics Scale [MPT]), and examining its power to predict political stances on issues seemingly unrelated to parenting attitudes (e.g., abortion, taxes, and same-sex marriage). Studies 3a and 3b explored construct validity while testing whether the family models translate into more general moral worldviews, which then serve as a foundation of political attitudes. Studies 4a through 4c tested generalizability, examining the relationship between the family models and political stances across different countries, data-collection modalities, and a representative American sample. Finally, Studies 5-7 explored biconceptualism and the tendency for these individuals to shift political attitudes as a consequence of situational factors, particularly moral framing, such that strict-father frames lead to increased support for conservative stances while nurturant-parent frames lead to increased support for liberal stances. Overall, we found support for each of MPT's assertions, suggesting that an important aspect of the conceptual and experiential basis of people's political attitudes lies in the strict-father and nurturant-parent family models. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Uncovering the moral heuristics of altruism: A philosophical scale.

Extant research suggests that individuals employ traditional moral heuristics to support their observed altruistic behavior; yet findings have largely been limited to inductive extrapolation and rely on relatively few traditional frames in so doing, namely, deontology in organizational behavior and virtue theory in law and economics. Given that these and competing moral frames such as utilitarianism can manifest as identical behavior, we develop a moral framing instrument—the Philosophical Moral-Framing Measure (PMFM)—to expand and distinguish traditional frames associated and disassociated with observed altruistic behavior. The validation of our instrument based on 1015 subjects in 3 separate real stakes scenarios indicates that heuristic forms of deontology, virtue-theory, and utilitarianism are strongly related to such behavior, and that egoism is an inhibitor. It also suggests that deontic and virtue-theoretical frames may be commonly perceived as intertwined and opens the door for new research on self-abnegation, namely, a perceived moral obligation toward suffering and self-denial. These findings hold the potential to inform ongoing conversations regarding organizational citizenship and moral crowding out, namely, how financial incentives can undermine altruistic behavior.

"A World Against Itself": The Dynamics of Good Nature and Virtue in Henry Fielding's Plays

In the eighteenth-century England, the aesthetic vision of most contemporary writers of the time was closely related to the social, political and religious system of belief. Augustan writers, satirists particularly, sought to reclaim for literature the morally privileged status, they thought, it supposedly held in the context of the Latitudinarian system of thought; the very rationale behind the ethic of good nature that distinguishes major writings of the time, namely the dramatic, journalistic and fictional works of the major eighteenth century novelist and satirist Henry Fielding. His major dramatic works not only display the influence of the Latitudinarian philosophy but mainly Shaftesbury’s moral theory of innate goodness, which Fielding revokes, offering then a representation of a more universal moral frame which rather reflects and criticizes the society of the author’s time. The providential pattern that Fielding creates in his plays valorizes indeed the principle of good-nature and the triumph of virtue against all apparent social evils. Most significantly, it has positioned Henry Fielding himself in a “comedic” tradition in which characters are not ultimately responsible for themselves. In the present paper, and with reference to Earl of Shaftesbury’s assumptions about the ideal good-natured man, I intend to evince that Fielding uses the value of good-nature and virtue not as pure moral abstractions, but rather as nodal points around which he organizes, and through which he presents a broad cultural and historical vision. With reference to his major regular comedies, and a through a close study of his most representative characters, I will attempt to evince that this underlying moral vision is more than an abstract rumination of the relative power of good and evil. When we view and consider such concepts as virtue, good-nature and ill-nature in the immediate contexts of his plays, we conceive a picture of a broad cultural landscape in which ethical values become nodal points of meaning, in which Fielding represents both the most basic, traditional values and the most sordid everyday events and attitudes of his society.

Messaging for environmental action: The role of moral framing and message source

Divisions between political Liberals and Conservatives on environmental issues seem to be widening, with Liberals generally more pro-environmental than Conservatives. We propose that common framing of environmental messages tends to perpetuate these gaps. We designed two experiments to examine this assumption and explore the prospects of narrowing these divisions using communication based on moral foundations theory. Moral foundations theory posits that there are at least five universal moral concerns that people intuitively use to form judgments. Research has found that political Liberals in the United States tend to base their judgments and communication on only two of these foundations, while Conservatives stress all five. We crafted two pro-environmental messages, one framed using liberal moral language (based on the two liberal moral foundations), the other using conservative moral language (based on all five moral foundations). Through survey research using two separate samples, we compared how political partisans responded to the messages when they were communicated from a liberal, conservative or nonpartisan message source. We found that the conservatively framed message resonated more with Conservatives than the liberally framed message, especially when combined with a conservative message source. Further, the conservatively framed message did not alienate liberal participants, even when combined with a conservative source. Thus, combining conservative framing (based on all five moral foundations) and conservative message sources in environmental messaging is likely to be more persuasive than relying on traditional liberal messaging or liberal sources.

Using Emotions to Frame Issues and Identities in Conflict: Farmer Movements on Social Media

AbstractPolarization and group formation processes on social media networks have received ample academic attention, but few studies have looked into the discursive interactions on social media through which intergroup conflicts develop. In this comparative case study, we analyzed two social media conflicts between farmers and animal right advocates to understand how conflicts establish, escalate, and return dormant through issue and identity framing and the discursive use of emotions. The results show that the two groups used the same set of frames throughout the three phases. We identify this as a symmetric conflict framing repertoire. The groups both use a dominant moral frame (animal welfare is of absolute value), but express distinct views on policy solutions. This triggers a contestation of credibility (who knows best and who cares most for animals) in which the two groups use the same set of issue and identity frames to directly oppose each other. The binary opposition is initially established through issue framing but escalates into an identity conflict that involves group labeling and blaming. The discursive use of emotion reinforces this escalation in two ways. First, it reinforces a vicious cycle in the contestation of credibility: While emotions are implicitly used to frame oneself as caring and trustworthy, emotion is explicitly used to frame the other party as deceptive and irrational. Second, disputants use collective emotions as a response to the other group’s offensive actions (blaming) and as a justification of one’s own collective actions. We discuss how this conflict differs from previously studied conflicts to provide plausible explanations for these findings.