Lakoff's Theory of Moral Reasoning in Presidential Campaign Advertisements, 1952–2012

How to identify moral language in presidential speeches: A comparison between a social-psychological and a cognitive-linguistic approach to corpus analysis

“…First, various studies used a social-psychological approach to identify language that could be ascribed to either the Strict Father or the Nurturant Parent model (e. g. Deason and Gonzales 2012;Moses and Gonzales 2015;Ohl et al 2013). In these social-psychological studies, any expression that could be considered an example of the Strict Father or Nurturant Parent models was identified, without considering its metaphoricity.…”

“…This resulted in eleven categories for the Strict Father model, such as Work Ethic, Self-Interest, Right and Wrong, and Moral control, and fifteen categories for the Nurturant Parent model, of which some examples are Nurturance, Helpfulness, Connectedness, and Openmindedness. Ohl et al (2013) based their taxonomy solely on the descriptions of the Strict Father and Nurturant parent models, which resulted in eight subordinate categories linked to Strict Father reasoning, such as Danger comes from human agents, Opposes illegitimate authority, and emphasizes moral strength, and eight subordinate categories linked to Nurturant Parent reasoning, such as Danger comes from bad environment, Encourages leading by example, and Encourages self-nurturance. Moses and Gonzales (2015) based their taxonomy on the descriptions of the two moral-metaphorical frameworks that follow from the conceptions of the two family models.…”

“…Moses and Gonzales (2015) studied written transcripts of 202 presidential campaign advertisements. Ohl et al (2013) applied a different coding method. In this study, complete presidential campaign advertisements were coded for the presence of each of the sixteen categories that they distinguish.…”

“…Even though proven to be popular, TMR has also received some critique. One point of criticism addressed by a number of studies is the relatively small amount of empirical support that Lakoff presents to support his theory (e. g. Bar-Lev 2007;Ohl et al 2013). Accordingly, several studies (e. g. Cienki 2005; Deason and Gonzales 2012; Moses and Gonzales 2015;Ohl et al 2013;Wolters 2012) have examined political discourse to test Lakoff's assertions on moral reasoning.…”

“…One point of criticism addressed by a number of studies is the relatively small amount of empirical support that Lakoff presents to support his theory (e. g. Bar-Lev 2007;Ohl et al 2013). Accordingly, several studies (e. g. Cienki 2005; Deason and Gonzales 2012; Moses and Gonzales 2015;Ohl et al 2013;Wolters 2012) have examined political discourse to test Lakoff's assertions on moral reasoning. However, at least two distinct annotation schemes have been used to answer these questions; while social-psychological scholars have identified any expression that could be considered an example of one of the two models, without considering the metaphoricity of the expression (Deason and Gonzales 2012;Moses and Gonzales 2015;Ohl et al 2013), cognitive-linguistic scholars have analyzed texts to find metaphorical language that could be ascribed to one of the two models (Cienki 2005;Wolters 2012).…”