ABSTRACT

Moral 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.

摘要

道德基础理论（MFT）和直觉道德与榜样模型（MIME）认为道德判断是建立在一套普遍的基本道德直觉上的。大量的研究支持了许多MFT和MIME的中心假设。但是，这项研究的重要先决条件-能够以可靠的程序提取媒体刺激中代表的潜在道德内容的能力-尚未得到系统地研究。在本文中，我们对不同的提取程序进行了严格的测试，通过确定一系列可靠性强调了挑战，采用计算方法开发了新的可靠性测试和编码程序，并提供了使道德直觉提取的可靠性和有效性最大化的解决方案。在六项内容分析研究中，包括一项大型的基于人群的研究，我们证明了：（1）传统的内容分析方法导致可靠性较低；（2）编码可靠性的变化可以通过文本特征和人类编码人员的特征来预测；（3）可靠性在很大程度上不受编码人员培训细节的影响。我们表明，通过简化的培训和将道德基础视为快速，自发的直觉的编码技术，可以得出可接受的评估者之间的共识，并有可能导致更有效的道德直觉提取。尽管这项研究的动机是与MFT和MIME研究有关，但是这项研究的方法和发现对于从超出道德信息范围的文字叙述中提取潜在内容具有启示意义。因此，我们为有兴趣在自己的工作中应用这种新方法的研究人员提供了一种工具。