Extracting Latent Moral Information from Text Narratives: Relevance,Challenges, and Solutions |
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| Authors: | René Weber J Michael Mangus Richard Huskey Frederic R Hopp Ori Amir Reid Swanson |
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| Institution: | 1. Department of Communication, UC Santa Barbara Media Neuroscience Lab, Santa Barbara, CA, USA;2. Institute for Collaborative Biotechnologies, UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, USArenew@comm.ucsb.edu;4. Institute for Collaborative Biotechnologies, UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, USA;5. School of Communication, The Ohio State University Cognitive Communication Science Lab, Columbus, OH, USA;6. Institute for Creative Technologies, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA |
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| Abstract: | ABSTRACTMoral Foundations Theory (MFT) and the Model of Intuitive Morality and Exemplars (MIME) contend that moral judgments are built on a universal set of basic moral intuitions. A large body of research has supported many of MFT’s and the MIME’s central hypotheses. Yet, an important prerequisite of this research—the ability to extract latent moral content represented in media stimuli with a reliable procedure—has not been systematically studied. In this article, we subject different extraction procedures to rigorous tests, underscore challenges by identifying a range of reliabilities, develop new reliability test and coding procedures employing computational methods, and provide solutions that maximize the reliability and validity of moral intuition extraction. In six content analytical studies, including a large crowd-based study, we demonstrate that: (1) traditional content analytical approaches lead to rather low reliabilities; (2) variation in coding reliabilities can be predicted by both text features and characteristics of the human coders; and (3) reliability is largely unaffected by the detail of coder training. We show that a coding task with simplified training and a coding technique that treats moral foundations as fast, spontaneous intuitions leads to acceptable inter-rater agreement, and potentially to more valid moral intuition extractions. While this study was motivated by issues related to MFT and MIME research, the methods and findings in this study have implications for extracting latent content from text narratives that go beyond moral information. Accordingly, we provide a tool for researchers interested in applying this new approach in their own work. |
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