Appraisal of the Fairness Moral Foundation Predicts the Language Use Involving Moral Issues on Twitter Among Japanese

Abstract

Moral appraisals are found to be associated with a person’s individual differences (e.g., political ideology), and the effects of individual differences on language use have been studied within the framework of the Moral Foundations Theory (MFT). However, the relationship between one’s moral concern and the use of language involving morality on social media is not self-evident. The present exploratory study investigated that relationship using the MFT. Participants’ tweets and self-reported responses to the questionnaire were collected to measure the degree of their appraisals according to the five foundations of the MFT. The Japanese version of the Moral Foundations Dictionary (J-MFD) was used to quantify the number of words in tweets relevant to the MFT’s five moral foundations. The results showed that endorsement of the Fairness and Authority foundations predicted the word frequency in the J-MFD across all five foundations. The findings suggest that the trade-off relationship between the Fairness and Authority foundations plays a key role in online language communication. The implications and future directions to scrutinize that foundation are discussed.

Moral expressions, sources, and frames: Examining COVID-19 vaccination posts by facebook public pages

“…The amount of moral expression in our data is relatively high, compared to previous studies on other social media content such as Twitter discussions ( Matsuo et al, 2021 ; Mutlu et al, 2020 ; Van Vliet, 2021 ). This suggests that talking about COVID-19 vaccine in a moral way is a common practice on Facebook public pages.…”

Are Meat Alternatives a Moral Concern? A Comparison of English and Japanese Tweets

“…To gauge and understand moral foundations from texts, we used the Moral Foundations Dictionary (MFD) [25] and the translated Japanese version (J-MFD) [26] that has been well validated in multiple studies [27,28]. Using these dictionaries, we measured the frequency of co-occurrence of moral words from MFD or J-MFD with mentions of meat alternatives.…”

Morality-Based Assertion and Homophily on Social Media: A Cultural Comparison Between English and Japanese Languages

“…The J-MFD consists of 718 moral terms in total ( https://github.com/ soramame0518/j-mfd). Both the MFD and J-MFD were used to study moral foundations from the text (Haidt and Graham, 2007;Dehghani et al, 2016;Kaur and Sasahara, 2016;Matsuo et al, 2021).…”

“…Although we are aware of other variations of the MFD (Garten et al, 2016;Araque et al, 2020;Hopp et al, 2021) for English, the same is not available for Japanese. In addition, the J-MFD has been well-validated (Matsuo et al, 2019) and applied to analyze Japanese tweets (Matsuo et al, 2021). Therefore, we decided to use the original MFD and its counterpart, the J-MFD, to ensure equivalence in morality measurement methods.…”

“…Here WEIRD corresponds to the section of society consisting of people who are Western, educated, industrialized, rich and Democratic. However, few researchers have studied morality in the context of Asian cultures (Bespalov et al, 2017;Kitamura and Matsuo, 2021;Matsuo et al, 2021). Considering language as a proxy for culture (Kramsch, 2011), we focused on comparing the moral concerns of Japanese-and English-speaking individuals.…”