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Framing public-health behaviors as benefiting others, rather than the self, can increase behavior uptake in adults. However, there are mixed results on the effects of such messaging in a vaccination context, and it is unclear how children reason about the social and moral implications of vaccination. In this study, we present school-aged children ( N = 60) with hypothetical vaccine-like behaviors and manipulate whether they benefit the self or others, and whether they prevent low or high severity harm. We find that children readily endorse these behaviors when they prevent high severity harm, and that the beneficiary of the behavior does not impact children’s endorsement. Younger children thought vaccine-like behaviors were morally important regardless of who they protected; However, as children get older, they thought about the vaccine-like behaviors in moral terms when they protected others. We discuss potential implications for how communications about vaccination may impact children’s reasoning about others.
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Morality in the Mundane: Categorizing Moral Reasoning in Real-Life Social Situations
Moral reasoning reflects how people acquire and apply moral rules in particular situations. With social interactions increasingly happening online, social media provides an unprecedented opportunity to assess in-the-wild moral reasoning. We investigate the commonsense aspects of morality empirically using data from a Reddit subcommunity (i.e., a subreddit), r/AmITheAsshole, where an author describes their behavior in a situation and seeks comments about whether that behavior was appropriate. A commenter judges and provides reasons for whether an author or others’ behaviors were wrong. We focus on the novel problem of understanding the moral reasoning implicit in user comments about the propriety of an author’s behavior. Specifically, we explore associations between the common elements of the indicated rationale and the extractable social factors. Our results suggest that a moral response depends on the author’s gender and the topic of a post. Typical situations and behaviors include expressing anger emotion and using sensible words (e.g., f-ck, hell, and damn) in work-related situations. Moreover, we find that commonly expressed reasons also depend on commenters’ interests.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2116751
- PAR ID:
- 10538105
- Publisher / Repository:
- AAAI
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media
- Volume:
- 18
- ISSN:
- 2162-3449
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1648 to 1660
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1609/icwsm.v18i1.31415
