Moral Concerns are Differentially Observable in Language

Abstract

Language is a psychologically rich medium for human expression and communication. While it is often used in moral psychology as an intermediary between researcher and participant, much of the human experience that occurs through language — our relationships, conversations, and, in general, the everyday transmission of our thoughts — has yet to be studied in association with moral concerns. In order to understand how moral concerns relate to observed language usage, we paired Facebook status updates (N = 107,798) from English-speaking participants (n = 2,691) with their responses on the Moral Foundations Questionnaire, which measures Care, Fairness, Loyalty, Authority, and Purity concerns. Overall, we found consistent evidence that participants’ self-reported moral concerns can be predicted from their language, though the magnitude of this effect varied considerably among concerns. Across a diverse selection of Natural Language Processing methods, cross-validated R2 values ranged from 0.04 for predicting Fairness concerns to 0.21for predicting Purity concerns. In follow-up analyses, each moral concern was found to be related to distinct patterns of relational, emotional, and social language. Our results are the first finding relating internally valid measures of moral concerns to observations of language, motivating several new avenues for exploring and investigating how the moral domain intersects with language usage.

Morality Beyond the WEIRD: How the Nomological Network of Morality Varies Across Cultures

“…Scores on the MFQ-1 have also been correlated with political ideology (Graham et al, 2009;Kivikangas et al, 2021; also see Hatemi et al, 2019), emotional reactions to various moral transgressions (Atari, Davani, & Dehghani, 2020), religiosity (Yi & Tsang, 2020), vaccine hesitancy (Amin et al, 2017;Atari et al, 2022), patterns of language use (Kennedy et al, 2021), public policy attitudes (Christie et al, 2019;Clifford & Jerit, 2013;Koleva et al, 2012;), voting (Enke, 2020), and charitable giving (Nilsson et al, 2020).…”

Changing channels? A comparison of Fox and MSNBC in 2012, 2016, and 2020

“…Yet the differences in language of the two networks were primarily in measures of linguistic style, including noun and pronoun use. Sociopolitical dictionaries largely tailored to assess left‐right differences in language use, including moral metaphors and foundations, grievances, values, and personality, showed relatively modest effects (see also Kennedy et al., 2021).…”

“…Subtle messaging including “dog‐whistles,” aimed at resonating with their intended audiences, are likely to carry positive rewards for each network. An extensive empirical track record suggests that LIWC is well‐suited for assessing many of these subtle speech patterns (Boyd & Schwartz, 2021), and that it can outperform narrowly tailored dictionaries such as the MFD‐2 (Kennedy et al., 2021).…”

Does Regional Variation in Pathogen Prevalence Predict the Moralization of Language in COVID-19 News?

“…Indeed, the psychologically pluralistic nature of moral foundations manifests itself through the emotional and linguistic cues in everyday human interactions (Graham et al, 2013). Using language, people have the capacity to signal their personal values to others and thereby inform contentious ideological debates in the larger community, helping motivate social action and empowering community members to regulate one another’s behaviors (Boyd et al, 2015; Clifford & Jerit, 2013; Kennedy et al, 2021; Li & Tomasello, 2021). Therefore, it can be argued that language which attempts to influence and regulate community behavior through means of value-driven reasoning may be especially instrumental for individuals who reside in high pathogen prevalence regions.…”