The paucity of morality in everyday talk
Open accessAbstract
Given its centrality in scholarly and popular discourse, morality should be expected to figure prominently in everyday talk. We test this expectation by examining the frequency of moral content in three contexts, using three methods: (a) Participants’ subjective frequency estimates ( N = 581); (b) Human content analysis of unobtrusively recorded in-person interactions ( N = 542 participants; n = 50,961 observations); and (c) Computational content analysis of Facebook posts ( N = 3822 participants; n = 111,886 observations). In their self-reports, participants estimated that 21.5% of their interactions touched on morality (Study 1), but objectively, only 4.7% of recorded conversational samples (Study 2) and 2.2% of Facebook posts (Study 3) contained moral content. Collectively, these findings suggest that morality may be far less prominent in everyday life than scholarly and popular discourse, and laypeople, presume.
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References 68 · Cited by 17
Research works printed but not linked: 1
- [54]Schlenker, B. R. Self-presentation. In Handbook of Self and Identity. 2nd ed. 542–570 (The Guilford Press, 2012).
- Authors
- Atari, M., Mehl, M. R., Graham, J., Doris, J. M., Schwarz, N., Davani, A. M., Omrani, A., Kennedy, B., Gonzalez, E., Jafarzadeh, N., Hussain, A., Mirinjian, A., Madden, A., Bhatia, R., Burch, A., Harlan, A., Sbarra, D. A., Raison, C. L., Moseley, S. A., Polsinelli, A. J., & Dehghani, M.
- Affiliations
- University of Southern California (US)
- University of Arizona (US)
- University of Utah (US)
- Cornell University (US)
- University of Wisconsin–Madison (US)
- Minnesota Epilepsy Group (US)
- Indiana University School of Medicine (US)
- Corresponding author
- Atari, Mohammad
- ORCID
- Venue
- Scientific Reports
- Published
- 2023-04-12
- Volume
- 13
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 5967-5967
- ISSN
- 2045-2322 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC10097712
- OpenAlex
- W4365150535
- Cited by
- 17
- References
- 68
- Citations by year
- 2026: 3 · 2025: 7 · 2024: 4 · 2023: 3
- FWCI
- 2.54
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Locations
- Scientific Reports (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- UA Campus Repository (The University of Arizona) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- IUScholarWorks (Indiana University) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- OSF Preprints (OSF Preprints) (submittedVersion)
- Topics
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Language and Linguistics › Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies
- Social Sciences › Education › Values and Moral Education
- Keywords
- morality, everyday conversation, moral content, conversation, Facebook posts, moral discourse
- MeSH terms
- Communication, Humans, Morals, Self Report, Social Networking
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