An official website of the United States government
Online platforms offer forums with rich, real-world illustrations of moral reasoning. Among these, the r/AmITheAsshole (AITA) subreddit has become a prominent resource for computational research. In AITA, a user (author) describes an interpersonal moral scenario, and other users (commenters) provide moral judgments with reasons for who in the scenario is blameworthy. Prior work has focused on predicting moral judgments from AITA posts and comments. This study introduces the concept of moral sparks—key narrative excerpts that commenters highlight as pivotal to their judgments. Thus, sparks represent heightened moral attention, guiding readers to effective rationales. Through 24,676 posts and 175,988 comments, we demonstrate that research in social psychology on moral judgments extends to real-world scenarios. For example, negative traits (rude) amplify moral attention, whereas sympathetic traits (vulnerable) diminish it. Similarly, linguistic features, such as emotionally charged terms (e.g., anger), heighten moral attention, whereas positive or neutral terms (leisure and bio) attenuate it. Moreover, we find that incorporating moral sparks enhances pretrained language models’ performance on predicting moral judgment, achieving gains in F1 scores of up to 5.5%. These results demonstrate that moral sparks, derived directly from AITA narratives, capture key aspects of moral judgment and perform comparably to prior methods that depend on human annotation or large-scale generative modeling.
more »
« less
The moral obligations of conflict and resistance
Abstract Morality has two key features: (1) moral judgments are not solely determined by what your group thinks, and (2) moral judgments are often applied to members of other groups as well as your own group. Cooperative motives do not explain how young children reject unfairness, and assert moral obligations, both inside and outside their groups. Resistance and experience with conflicts, alongside cooperation, is key to the emergence and development of moral obligation.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 1728918
- PAR ID:
- 10285301
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Behavioral and Brain Sciences
- Volume:
- 43
- ISSN:
- 0140-525X
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
Abstract Developmental perspectives on prejudice provide a fundamental and important key to the puzzle for determining how to address prejudice. Research with historically disadvantaged and advantaged groups in childhood and adolescence reveals the complexity of social cognitive and moral judgments about prejudice, discrimination, bias, and exclusion. Children are aware of status and hierarchies, and often reject the status quo. Intervention, to be effective, must happen early in development, before prejudice and stereotypes are deeply entrenched.more » « less
-
When news about moral transgressions goes viral on social media, the same person may repeatedly encounter identical reports about a wrongdoing. In a longitudinal experiment ( N = 607 U.S. adults from Mechanical Turk), we found that these repeated encounters can affect moral judgments. As participants went about their lives, we text-messaged them news headlines describing corporate wrongdoings (e.g., a cosmetics company harming animals). After 15 days, they rated these wrongdoings as less unethical than new wrongdoings. Extending prior laboratory research, these findings reveal that repetition can have a lasting effect on moral judgments in naturalistic settings, that affect plays a key role, and that increasing the number of repetitions generally makes moral judgments more lenient. Repetition also made fictitious descriptions of wrongdoing seem truer, connecting this moral-repetition effect with past work on the illusory-truth effect. The more times we hear about a wrongdoing, the more we may believe it—but the less we may care.more » « less
-
What is the fair way to distribute resources? Past research documents widespread egalitarianintuitions. Charitable donations show the prevalence of redistributive concerns. For recentcontractualist accounts of moral cognition, however, moral judgments should coincide with whatrational agents would agree to in a negotiation, and reflect each party’s relative bargainingpower. How can these perspectives be reconciled? We suggest a key difference lies in whetherthe logic of bargaining drives the underlying interaction, turning existing asymmetries intobargaining power differences. Participants (n = 887) make third-party judgments about themorally best split of a fixed amount. When the context is one of bilateral (Study 1) or third-party(Study 2) negotiation, moral judgments overwhelmingly track bargaining power differences, andcan be predicted with striking quantitative precision. In a closely matched donation setting inwhich the logic of bargaining is irrelevant, moral intuitions are completely reversed, insteadreflecting redistributive or egalitarian concerns.more » « less
-
Abstract Understanding motivations underlying acts of hatred are essential for developing strategies to prevent such extreme behavioral expressions of prejudice (EBEPs) against marginalized groups. In this work, we investigate the motivations underlying EBEPs as a function of moral values. Specifically, we propose EBEPs may often be best understood as morally motivated behaviors grounded in people’s moral values and perceptions of moral violations. As evidence, we report five studies that integrate spatial modeling and experimental methods to investigate the relationship between moral values and EBEPs. Our results, from these U.S. based studies, suggest that moral values oriented around group preservation are predictive of the county-level prevalence of hate groups and associated with the belief that extreme behavioral expressions of prejudice against marginalized groups are justified. Additional analyses suggest that the association between group-based moral values and EBEPs against outgroups can be partly explained by the belief that these groups have done something morally wrong.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X19002401
