Moral and Affective Film Set (MAAFS): A normed moral video database

Abstract

Moral psychology has relied nearly exclusively on text stimuli in the development and testing of theories. However, text stimuli lack the rich variety of morally-relevant social and contextual cues available in everyday interactions. A consequence of this pervasive ecological invalidity may be that moral psychological theories are mischaracterized by an overreliance on cue-impoverished moral stimuli. We address this limitation by developing a cue-rich Moral and Affective Film Set (MAAFS). We crowd-sourced videos of moral behaviours, using previously validated text stimuli and definitions of moral foundations as a guide for content. Crowd-sourced clips were rated by 322 American and 253 Australian participants on a range of moral and affective dimensions, including wrongness, moral foundation relevance, punishment, arousal, discrete emotion-relevance, clarity, previous exposure, and how weird/uncommon the moral acts were. The final stimulus set contained sixty nine moral videos. Ratings confirmed that the videos are reliably rated as morally wrong and feature a variety of moral concerns. The validation process revealed features that make the MAAFS useful for future research: (1) the MAAFS includes a range of videos that depict everyday transgressions, (2) certain videos evoke negative emotions at an intensity comparable to mood induction films, (3) the videos are largely novel: participants had never seen more than 90% of the videos. We anticipate the MAAFS will be a particularly valuable tool for researchers in moral psychology who seek to study morality in scenarios that approximate real-life. However, the MAAFS may be valuable for other fields of psychology, for example, affective scientists may use these videos as a mood induction procedure. The complete stimulus set, links to videos, and normative statistics can be accessed at osf.io/8w3en.

Good Robots, Bad Robots: Morally Valenced Behavior Effects on Perceived Mind, Morality, and Trust

“…1). Each of the stimulus videos depicted one of the six moralfoundation dilemmas or one non-moral dilemma; dilemmas and responses were designed by cross-referencing validated mini-vignettes [70,71] and then adapted for face-valid interactions with both agents. The preliminary scripts were reviewed by two experts specializing in moral psychology in communication scenarios, and based on feedback were adjusted to minimize conflation of foundations.…”

See something, say something? exploring the gap between real and imagined moral courage

“…As such, researchers developing moral vignettes should take care to assess the realism of their stimuli. A good strategy may be to begin stimulus development with crowdsourcing or focus group approaches (Gray & Keeney, 2015;McCurrie et al, 2018) in order to craft more easily imaginable scenarios. It should also be kept in mind that outside the laboratory, the way in which people are exposed to morally relevant events is often by reading or hearing about them rather than experiencing them first-hand (e.g., when learning of these events through the news or social media).…”

KAPODI- The Searchable Database of 364 Available Emotional Stimuli Sets

“…A few studies (e.g. Baveye et al, 2013;McCurrie et al, 2018) combine research conducted in multiple continents (3.62%) and are therefore allocated to the Multiple column (see Table 12). Separated by subfolders however, an accentuated focus on types of ES per continent becomes visible: publications from research conducted in Asia, as well as Australia and Oceania, North America, and South America, present mainly facestimuli sets; the majority of publications of research conducted in Europe present wordstimuli.…”