The Socio-Moral Image Database (SMID): A Novel Stimulus Set for the Study of Social, Moral and Affective Processes

Abstract

A major obstacle for the design of rigorous, reproducible studies in moral psychology is the lack of suitable stimulus sets. Here, we present the Socio-Moral Image Database (SMID), the largest standardized moral stimulus set assembled to date, containing 2,941 freely available photographic images, representing a wide range of morally (and affectively) positive, negative and neutral content. The SMID was validated with over 820,525 individual judgments from 2,716 participants, with normative ratings currently available for all images on affective valence and arousal, moral wrongness, and relevance to each of the five moral values posited by Moral Foundations Theory. We present a thorough analysis of the SMID regarding (1) inter-rater consensus, (2) rating precision, and (3) breadth and variability of moral content. Additionally, we provide recommendations for use aimed at efficient study design and reproducibility, and outline planned extensions to the database. We anticipate that the SMID will serve as a useful resource for psychological, neuroscientific and computational (e.g., natural language processing or computer vision) investigations of social, moral and affective processes. The SMID images, along with associated normative data and additional resources are available at https://osf.io/2rqad/.

The Ties That Bind: Low Morals, High Deception, and Dark Creativity

“…Last, moral foundations were measured using self-report scales, providing a limited understanding of one's moral concerns. Future research can explore using moral vignettes (Clifford et al, 2015) or responses to socio-moral images (Crone et al, 2018); they may also want to capitalize on the Moral Foundations Dictionary (Graham et al, 2009;Hopp et al, 2021) when framing real-world divergent thinking tasks.…”

Deep Affect: Using objects, scenes and facial expressions in a deep neural network to predict arousal and valence values of images

“…The study was conducted on five publicly available affective databases: The International Affective Picture System 73 (IAPS), The Nencki Affective Picture System 74 (NAPS), The Open Affective Standardised Image Set 4 (OASIS), The Socio-Moral Image Database 75 (SMID) and The Image Emotion Dataset 18 (IED). Each dataset had pre-assigned arousal and valence values which were collected from a series of independent viewers, shown in Table 1.…”

The Morality of War: A Review and Research Agenda

“…But there are many other methodological avenues to explore and exploit as well. In addition to written vignettes, psychologists studying morality in general (not in war) have, for example, developed comprehensive image and video sets that capture the key features of moral judgment (Clifford, Iyengar, Cabeza, & Sinnott-Armstrong, 2015; Crone, Bode, Murawski, & Laham, 2017; McCurrie, Crone, Bigelow, & Laham, 2018); brain imaging techniques have been used to investigate the neural correlates of justified and unjustified harm (Domínguez et al, 2018) and moral as opposed to nonmoral cognition (Theriault, Waytz, Heiphetz, & Young, 2017); and beyond the lab, experience-sampling methods provide a snapshot of the moral judgments people make in everyday life (Bollich et al, 2016; Hofmann, Wisneski, Brandt, & Skitka, 2014). Furthermore, through conceptual analyses of anthropological, religious, and philosophical texts (Haidt & Graham, 2007; Haidt & Joseph, 2004), linguistic analyses of speeches by religious and political leaders (Graham, Haidt, & Nosek, 2009), and analyses of legal distinctions in systems of criminal law around the world (Mikhail, 2007), general models of moral judgment such as universal moral grammar (Mikhail, 2011) and moral-foundations theory (MFT; Haidt & Graham, 2004; Haidt & Joseph, 2004) have been developed.…”

“…Moral psychologists have a long tradition of creating moral dilemmas and scenarios (or drawing them from moral philosophy) for their research endeavors (Cushman, 2014). People’s reasoning about or reactions to these vignettes are then used to uncover general features of moral psychology, for example, the domains of moral concern (e.g., Clifford et al, 2015; Crone et al, 2017; McCurrie, Crone, Bigelow, & Laham, 2018), or the emotional (e.g., Russell & Giner-Sorolla, 2013) and cognitive (Cushman, Young, & Hauser, 2006; Feltz & May, 2017) processes underpinning moral judgment and decision-making. Kohlberg’s scenario about Heinz, who steals medicine for his sick wife (Colby & Kohlberg, 1987), is perhaps the most famous of these vignettes.…”