Moral Framing and Charitable Donation: Integrating Exploratory Social Media Analyses and Confirmatory Experimentation

Abstract

Do appeals to moral values promote charitable donation during natural disasters? Using Distributed Dictionary Representation, we analyze tweets posted during Hurricane Sandy to explore associations between moral values and charitable donation sentiment. We then derive hypotheses from the observed associations and test these hypotheses across a series of preregistered experiments that investigate the effects of moral framing on perceived donation motivation (Studies 2 & 3), hypothetical donation (Study 4), and real donation behavior (Study 5). Overall, we find consistent positive associations between moral care and loyalty framing with donation sentiment and donation motivation. However, in contrast with people's perceptions, we also find that moral frames may not actually have reliable effects on charitable donation, as measured by hypothetical indications of donation and real donation behavior. Overall, this work demonstrates that theoretically constrained, exploratory social media analyses can be used to generate viable hypotheses, but also that such approaches should be paired with rigorous controlled experiments.

Moral reframing: A technique for effective and persuasive communication across political divides

“…Finally, a third category of moral reframing research has explored its efficacy in shaping liberals' and conservatives' attitudes on issues that are largely nonpolitical or, at least, not strongly aligned with either liberal or conservative political ideologies. These studies have targeted outcomes like vaccine hesitancy, diversity and inclusion, and stem cell technology (Amin et al, 2017;Brannon, Carter, Murdock-Perriera, & Higginbotham, 2018;Clifford, Jerit, Rainey, & Motyl, 2015;Hoover et al, 2018;Kljajic & Feinberg, 2019;Lee, Yoon, Lee, & Royne, 2018;Winterich, Mittal, & Aquino, 2013). Along these lines, a handful of studies have examined the effects of moral reframing on liberals' and conservatives' tendencies to donate money to different types of charities.…”

Moral Foundations Twitter Corpus: A Collection of 35k Tweets Annotated for Moral Sentiment

“…Already, portions of this corpus have facilitated advances in both theoretical and methodological research. For example, Hoover et al (2018) relies on the Hurricane Sandy annotations to investigate the relationship between charitable donation and moral framing, and Mooijman et al (2018) uses the Baltimore Protest annotations to predict violent protest from online moral rhetoric. These annotation sets have also been used for recent work advancing methods for measuring sentiment in natural language (Garten, Boghrati, Hoover, Johnson, & Dehghani, 2016;Garten et al, 2018;Lin et al, 2018).…”

“…While, as noted above, these domains were selected to maximize the base rates of moral sentiment, the proportion of tweets containing moral sentiment within each domain was still too low to use MORAL FOUNDATIONS TWITTER CORPUS fully randomized sampling. Accordingly, our general sampling procedure relied on a combination of random sampling and semi-supervised selection as in Garten et al (2018); Hoover et al (2018).…”

Moral Foundations Twitter Corpus: A collection of 35k tweets annotated for moral sentiment

“…While, as noted above, these domains were selected to maximize the base rates of moral sentiment, the proportion of tweets containing moral sentiment within each domain was still too low to use fully randomized sampling. Accordingly, our general sampling procedure relied on a combination of random sampling and semi-supervised selection as in Garten et al (2018); Hoover et al (2018).…”