Cultural Foundations of Morality and Political Ideology

• In Event: 3551 - Section on Sociology of Culture Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: 8. Culture Section Network: Networks, Culture, and Cognition

Abstract

In recent decades, much of the theoretical framing of research on morality has come from moral psychology. This study seeks to reframe the social scientific study of morality through an empirical analysis of moral keywords, identifying the cultural foundations of moral discourse and showing how these correspond to a multidimensional space of political ideologies. Building on the six dimensions of morality proposed by Moral Foundations Theory, this study uses data from two thesauri to create a network of synonyms and antonyms for MFT keywords, expanding and mapping a moral field using social network analysis and correspondence analysis. This analysis finds a two-dimensional structure differentiating moral concerns about goodness and evil from those of reliability and treachery, with honesty and dishonesty as a central opposition. These results challenge MFT's distinction between individualizing and binding values and support a distinction between morality and social convention as originally suggested by Turiel. This moral field is then used to measure patterns in moral vocabulary within a politically-differentiated field of online news sources. Data come from internet site searches of news websites for US television and cable news, newspapers, and online outlets with contrasting institutional and ideological characteristics. Adding this keyword usage data to the network of synonyms and antonyms, results show that news outlets vary in both the relative volume and polarity of their moral discourse and that these variables can be used to identify political ideologies, including oppositions between left and liberal and right and conservative. The paper proposes a ribbon model of political ideologies which updates previous theorizations of the multidimensional space of ideology. The conclusion draws implications for the study of morality, cognitive sociology, and relational methodology in the social sciences.

Author

• John Sonnett, University of Mississippi