The Problem of Purity in Moral Psychology

Quantifying the emergence of moral foundational lexicon in child language development

Theorists have argued that morality builds on several core modular foundations. When do different moral foundations emerge in life? Prior work has explored the conceptual development of different aspects of morality in childhood. Here, we offer an alternative approach to investigate the developmental emergence of moral foundations through the lexicon, namely the words used to talk about moral foundations. We develop a large-scale longitudinal analysis of the linguistic mentions of five moral foundations (in both virtuous and vicious forms) in naturalistic speech between English-speaking children with ages ranging from 1 to 6 and their caretakers. Using computational methods, we collect a dataset of 1,371 human-annotated moral utterances and automatically annotate around one million utterances in child-caretaker conversations. We discover that in childhood, words for expressing the individualizing moral foundations (i.e. Care/Harm, Fairness/Cheating) tend to emerge earlier and more frequently than words for expressing the binding moral foundations (i.e. Authority/Subversion, Loyalty/Betrayal, Purity/Degradation), and words for Care/Harm are expressed substantially more often than the other foundations. We find significant differences between children and caretakers in how often they talk about Fairness, Cheating, and Degradation. Furthermore, we show that the information embedded in childhood speech allows computational models to predict moral judgment of novel scenarios beyond the scope of child-caretaker conversations. Our work provides a large-scale documentation of the moral foundational lexicon in early linguistic communication in English and forges a new link between moral language development and computational studies of morality.

Within your rights: Dissociating wrongness and permissibility in moral judgement

Are we ever morally permitted to do what is morally wrong? It seems intuitive that we are, but evidence for dissociations among judgement of permissibility and wrongness is relatively scarce. Across four experiments (N = 1438), we show that people judge that some behaviours can be morally wrong and permissible. The dissociations arise because these judgements track different morally relevant aspects of everyday moral encounters. Judgements of individual rights predicted permissibility but not wrongness, while character assessment predicted wrongness but not permissibility. These findings suggest a picture in which moral evaluation is granular enough to express reasoning about different types of normative considerations, notably the possibility that people can exercise their rights in morally problematic ways.

The (moral) language of hate

Humans use language toward hateful ends, inciting violence and genocide, intimidating and denigrating others based on their identity. Despite efforts to better address the language of hate in the public sphere, the psychological processes involved in hateful language remain unclear. In this work, we hypothesize that morality and hate are concomitant in language. In a series of studies, we find evidence in support of this hypothesis using language from a diverse array of contexts, including the use of hateful language in propaganda to inspire genocide (Study 1), hateful slurs as they occur in large text corpora across a multitude of languages (Study 2), and hate speech on social-media platforms (Study 3). In post hoc analyses focusing on particular moral concerns, we found that the type of moral content invoked through hate speech varied by context, with Purity language prominent in hateful propaganda and online hate speech and Loyalty language invoked in hateful slurs across languages. Our findings provide a new psychological lens for understanding hateful language and points to further research into the intersection of morality and hate, with practical implications for mitigating hateful rhetoric online.