Morality has a profound impact on interpersonal relationships and societal structures, and arguably the overall fabric of civilization. Given its significance, it ought to be on people’s minds frequently. However, a series of three studies published in Scientific Reports suggests otherwise.
“For a long time, I have been interested in why different cultures differ so much in some aspects of morality yet similar in others. In [this] paper, I explored whether other people talk about morality as much as I do,” said Mohammad Atari (@MohammadAtari90), an assistant professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. “In other words, do lay people frequently use morality in their everyday talk?”
Studies 1A and 1B included 354 and 227 participants respectively, recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk. Participants in Sample 1A were asked to indicate the percentage of their daily conversations that included moral content, as well as to indicate out of 100 conversations per day, how many touched on morality. Participants responded to five questions relating to each of the five moral foundations (i.e., care, fairness, loyalty, authority, purity).
Participants were provided with a list of 15 subjects (e.g., entertainment, relationships, morality, sports, politics) and indicated the percent of their daily conversations or interactions that were about these topics. Sample 1B was a replication that used a visual response option, a pie chart with 20 distinct slices. Participants were to assume that each slice was worth 5%, and indicate how many slices would be allocated to each of the 15 topics presented in Study 1A.
Study 2 used the Electronically Activated Recorder, an app that gathers daily conversations intermittently multiple times per hour. Four samples yielded a total of 50,961 observations. All sound files were transcribed and three undergraduate research assistants coded the data for moral rhetoric.
Study 3 recruited 3643 participants from yourmorals.org who provided access to their private Facebook posts, for a total of 111,886 Facebook posts. A smaller set of posts were randomly sampled to get annotated for moral content by three research assistants.
How frequently do lay people talk about morality?
“The answer was surprising: While many people think they talk much about morality, we did not find that in our naturalistic observations of everyday life,” said Atari. “People don’t talk about moral issues much in their everyday lives (they might still think about them, though).”
Study 1 revealed that participants estimated that between 20 to 30% of everyday talk contains moral content, averaging at 21.5% across four assessments. However, in examining the moral content of audible snippets in Study 2, the researchers found that moral speech, as coded in accordance to the five moral foundations, comprised 3.9% of everyday conversations. Study 3 showed that only 2.2% of Facebook posts contained moral language, with fairness/cheating comprising 47.5% of all moral content, followed by care/harm at 31.4%.
The researchers write, “the paucity of morality in observable everyday talk stands in stark contrast to lay intuitions and self-reports, as well as scholars’ emphasis, on the singular relevance of morality in everyday life.”
“I think there is much more to do in cross-cultural studies of morality,” Atari told PsyPost. “For example, culture-specific bottom-up studies of morality can be very informative. I have a paper with that approach published in Evolution and Human Behavior.”
“One thing I would add is about researcher diversity. As a scientific field, we cannot progress in understanding human psychology unless we have a diverse body of researchers at all levels. People from underrepresented cultures bring new questions to the table that researchers from the majority group may not have thought/known/cared about.”
The study, “The paucity of morality in everyday talk”, was authored by Mohammad Atari, Matthias R. Mehl, Jesse Graham, John M. Doris, Norbert Schwarz, Aida Mostafazadeh Davani, Ali Omrani, Brendan Kennedy, Elaine Gonzalez, Nikki Jafarzadeh, Alyzeh Hussain, Arineh Mirinjian, Annabelle Madden, Rhea Bhatia, Alexander Burch, Allison Harlan, David A. Sbarra, Charles L. Raison, Suzanne A. Moseley, Angelina J. Polsinelli, and Morteza Dehghani