Moral foundations theory and the narrative self: towards an improved concept of moral selfhood for the empirical study of morality

Within the empirical study of moral decision making, people’s morality is often identified by measuring general moral values through a questionnaire, such as the Moral Foundations Questionnaire provided by Moral Foundations Theory (MFT). However, the success of these moral values in predicting people’s behaviour has been disappointing. The...

Why Are General Moral Values Poor Predictors of Concrete Moral Behavior in Everyday Life? A Conceptual Analysis and Empirical Study

Within moral psychology, theories focusing on the conceptualization and empirical measurement of people’s morality in terms of general moral values –such as Moral Foundation Theory- (implicitly) assume general moral values to be relevant concepts for the explanation and prediction of behavior in everyday life. However, a solid theoretical and...

Evaluating catastrophic forgetting of state-of-the-art NLP models for predicting moral values

Personal moral values represent the motivation behind individuals' actions and opinions. Understanding these values is helpful both in predicting individuals' actions, such as violent protests, and building AI that can better collaborate with humans. Predicting moral values is a challenging problem due to the abstract and subjective essence of...

Estimating the transferability of state-of-the-art models in predicting moral values

Moral values play a crucial role in our decision-making process by defining what is right and wrong. With the emergence of political activism and moral discourse on social media, and the latest developments in Natural Language Processing, we are looking at an opportunity to analyze moral values to observe trends as they form. Recent studies have...