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We will examine whether the alignment of a social media post's moral framing and people's moral values increases sharing intentions through the reduction of cognitive reflection. In other words: Is the effect of aligning moral framing and moral values on sharing intentions mediated by cognitive reflection?

Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) is a cultural and evolutionary psychological theory developed to explain the anthropological origins of and variation in human moral reasoning on the basis of innate, modular foundations. These foundations concern dislike for the suffering of others (Care/harm), proportional fairness (Fairness/cheating), group loyalty (Loyalty/betrayal), deference to authority and tradition (Authority/subversion), and concerns with purity and contamination (Sanctity/degradation). The assessment of MFT has largely relied on Moral Foundations Questionnaire (MFQ) and more recently, Moral Foundations Dictionary (MFD) in text analytic studies. In the current project, we will examine structural validity of the Persian translation of MFQ and its personality and individual difference correlates in a non-Western culture, Iran. Further, we will examine the utility of the Persian translation of MFD using a text analysis approach.

In democratic societies, protests take place on a regular basis. Although peaceful protests are considered a crucial component of democracy, they can suddenly turn into violence. Many factors can predict violence in protests. Among others, moralization and moral congruence have been implicated in supporting violence in protests. This study examines the role of moralization of protests and perceived moral congruence in supporting violent behavior in a specific recent protest. Further, we incorporated economic and religious factors into the model, based on cultural aspects of the case under investigation. This project is multi-study and multi-modal in nature, with both hypothesis-testing components and exploratory analyses.

Using a multi-method (i.e., text analysis, survey analysis, experimental analysis), multi-measure (3 honor measures), dual-language (Persian and English) approach, we will examine how honor forms attitudes and behaviors in close relationships. We draw upon cultural and evolutionary theories underlying honor. Specifically, We propose honor to be part of a universally available knowledge network, or cultural mindset, that can be made accessible by subtle environmental cues. Honor, we propose, activates conservative attitudes toward close relationships, romantic threat sensitivity, and increases mate retention behaviors against potential rivals.

We are interested in the association between explicit and implicit bias and annotation of hate speech in US adults. Individuals vary in their agreement whether a piece of text should be categorized as "hate speech" (or harmful language), and in this study, we will examine how demographic variables, explicit bias, and implicit bias predict participants' annotation behavior. Since annotation of hate speech, by definition, depends on social groups, we will focus on 8 real social groups in this study, based on Kennedy et al. (2020, https://psyarxiv.com/hqjxn/): Mexican/Immigrant, Muslim, Communist/Socialist, Liberal, Black, Gay/LGBTQ, Woman, Jewish (these are the most common targets of hate-based rhetoric in the Gab Hate Corpus (Kennedy et al., 2020). Accordingly, we will ask all participants explicit measures of bias for all these groups, and each participant will be randomly assigned to complete an Implicit Association Test (IAT) relating to bias against one of these social groups.

Moral values, particularly Purity, may function as a double-edged sword in fighting off pathogens: on the constructive side, Purity values encourage social distancing and on the destructive side, they can lead to Xenophobic attitudes via extreme social and physical distancing from people from where a pathogenic threat originated in. Here, we test how moral values can lead to social distancing as well as Sinophobia amid the COVID-19 pandemic in different cultures and using different methodologies.

In this project, we examine the effect of syntax similarity with participants' writing style and media use on recalling sentences.

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The growing prominence of online hate speech is a threat to a safe and just society. This endangering phenomenon requires collaboration across the sciences in order to generate evidence-based knowledge of, and policies for, the dissemination of hatred in online spaces. To foster such collaborations, here we present the Gab Hate Corpus (GHC), consisting of 27,665 posts from the social network service gab.ai, each annotated by a minimum of three trained annotators. Annotators were trained to label posts according to a coding typology derived from a synthesis of hate speech definitions across legal, computational, psychological, and sociological research. We detail the development of the corpus, describe the resulting distributions of hate-based rhetoric, target group, and rhetorical framing labels, and establish baseline classification performance for each using standard natural language processing methods. The GHC, which is the largest theoretically-justified, annotated corpus of hate speech to date, provides opportunities for training and evaluating hate speech classifiers and for scientific inquiries into the linguistic and network components of hate speech.

The somatosensory reaction to different social circumstances has been proposed to trigger conscious emotional experiences. Here, we present a pre-registered experiment in which we examine the topographical maps associated with violations of different moral concerns. Specifically, participants (N = 596) were randomly assigned to scenarios of moral violations, and then drew their subjective somatosensory experience on two 48,954-pixel silhouettes. We demonstrate that bodily representations of different moral violations are slightly different. Further, we demonstrate that violations of moral concerns are felt in different parts of the body, and arguably result in different somatosensory experiences for liberals and conservatives. We also investigate how individual differences in moral concerns relate to bodily maps of moral violations. Finally, we use natural language processing to predict activation in body parts based on the semantic representation of textual stimuli. The findings shed light on the complex relationships between moral violations and somatosensory experiences.

The relationship between participants stance toward global warming and their level agreement on different statements.

The somatosensory reaction to different social circumstances has been proposed to trigger conscious emotional experiences. Here, we present a pre-registered experiment in which we examine the topographical maps associated with violations of different moral concerns. Specifically, participants (N = 596) were randomly assigned to scenarios of moral violations, and then drew their subjective somatosensory experience on two 48,954-pixel silhouettes. We demonstrate that bodily representations of different moral violations are slightly different. Further, we demonstrate that violations of moral concerns are felt in different parts of the body, and arguably result in different somatosensory experiences for liberals and conservatives. We also investigate how individual differences in moral concerns relate to bodily maps of moral violations. Finally, we use natural language processing to predict activation in body parts based on the semantic representation of textual stimuli. The findings shed light on the complex relationships between moral violations and somatosensory experiences.

We examine how the magnitude of sex differences in moral foundations vary across cultures.

We examine how the magnitude of sex differences in moral foundations vary across cultures.

We will examine whether people are more willing to share a social media post about a news headline if the framing of the post aligns with their moral values.