I am interested in how our psychological mechanisms perform in and adapt to our hyper-socialized, hyper-accelerated modern world of social media, smartphones, and cultural digitization. I find it vitally important to examine how this extensive digital new reality plays a role in the concurrent cultural polarization and youth mental health crises facing the US (and beyond).
My current research focuses on how individuals and groups form moral identities across cultures, primarily within the context of cultural conflicts. I study these psychological dynamics as they manifest in international conflicts, shift in experimental studies, and correlate with online language and behavior utilizing machine learning and other computational methods (NLP, geospatial measurement, etc.).
Research
Moral Values Predict County-Level COVID-19 Vaccination Rates in the United States
Why are Americans hesitant to get their Covid-19 Vaccinations?
Our research shows that the moral value of purity can predict vaccine hesitancy at the US county level beyond religiosity and political orientation.
Is Elon Musk Disgusting? The Moralization of Excessive Wealth Across Cultures
Ideological Threat Sensitivity and Group-Oriented Values
Beyond political ideology, could threat be at the root of endorsing binding moral values? The Moral Foundations Hypothesis traditionally argues that the endorsement of the group oriented binding foundations (loyalty, authority, and purity) are associated with conservatism (Atari, 2021; Graham et al., 2013). It’s argued that these conservative values act as group-centered strategies to cope with perceived threats (i.e. loyalty, authority, and purity help bolster ingroup cohesion to defend against perceived threats to the in-group)(Motivated social cognition theory, Jost and Amodio, 2012 ). Research has shown that exposure to threatening stimuli can increase conservative values and that this increase is more drastic amongst liberals than conservatives (Reactive Liberal Hypothesis, Van Leeuwen et al., 2014). In addition to threat motivating conservatism and liberals reactivity to threat, research has found that liberals and conservatives are threatened by different ideologically oriented topics (i.e. Illegal immigration vs climate change)(Brandt et al., 2021). Given this above research, we argue here that the relationship between political ideology and binding foundations is moderated by perceived threat in the environment, and that this threat is ideologically oriented.
Some cultures find excessive amounts of wealth immoral while some others are structured in a way that having too much money is morally praised. In this research, we examine how people's moral values predict support for redistributive policies, moralization of economic inequality, and moralization of excessive wealth. Our first study looked at the moral language associated with wealth across 6 languages. Our second study utilized nationally stratified samples from 19 nations (N = 3,902), in which participants made judgements about our constructs of interest, and completed the Moral Foundations Questionnaire-2 (MFQ-2). Overall, we found that values of equality, proportionality, and purity predicted the moralization of excessive wealth beyond culture, politics, and language.
Political Humility
In a time of growing polarization, how can we understand and learn from the political other?
Insights from Haidt & Shermer help us understand the logic and morality of our political opponent, then provide an avenue to learn from each other. Given the nature of in-group bias, the political truth in any situation lies somewhere between the conservative and liberal perspective.
Amidst the digital cultural revolution, how do we balance the availability of diverse perspectives with the cognitive limitations of motivated reasoning? How can we can turn down the anger and fear, and instead invoke the better angels of our nature in civil discourse?
“There will be bad science on both sides of the debate. The only antidote I know for that is to use the scientific method as scrupulously as possible” - James Flynn
The Moral Foundations Reddit Corpus (MFRC)
How do people speak morally online and how does it relate to offline behavior? How does the moral language on Reddit differ from other social media platforms? How do we teach machine learning algorithms about how people speak about moral values? Our project aims to answer these questions by providing the Moral Foundations Reddit Corpus, a collection of 16, 123 Reddit comments that have been curated from 12 distinct subreddits, hand-annotated by at least three trained annotators for 8 categories of moral sentiment.
Hateful Rhetoric in the Civil Comments News Corpus
In collaboration with Google Jigsaw, we examined the types of hate-based rhetoric expressed in uncivil news comments online. We hand annotated 16,099 uncivil comments from the toxic spans dataset for our sociological, psychological, and legal theory influenced construct of hate based rhetoric. This includes the categories of assaults on human dignity, calls to violence, vulgarity, the targeted group of hate, and whether the hate was expressed implicitly or explicitly.
LAPD Body Camera Annotation Manual For Officer Citizen Interaction
Can we better understand officer citizen communication by analyzing the 8,000 active body cameras worn by the LAPD? Given the immense amount of data, recent advancements in machine learning (ML), specifically in automated video and language analysis, is vital for utilizing this footage to better understand policing practices across different contexts. The first step is to create an annotation coding guide to teach humans to teach computers about good and bad policing behavior. In this coding guide, we outline the frameworks that we rely on to operationalize ``good communication'' for police officers at traffic stops (e.g. clarity, escalation control), describe how annotators can look for and label these constructs within video, and provide details on how this can be applied to police training and the analysis of police-citizen interactions.
The Moral Language of Hate
Is there a certain moral rhetorical pattern to hate and violence? In three studies, our research found a moral tone of purity and spiritual degradation underlying the hateful language in Nazi Propaganda, hateful slurs as they occur in multitude of languages, and hate speech on social media platforms.
Moral Congressional Speeches Predict a Polarized Congress
Can the moral language of congressional speeches inform us of polarization?
Our study shows that partisan roll-call votes in congress can be predicted by moral rhetoric.
Fighting Fire with Fire: How groups incentivize incivility on social media
Groups usually punish group members that violate norms of civility (i.e., rudeness or vulgarity). However, online (i.e., social media) discourse often derails into tit-for-tat cycles of incivility. In a social media study on Reddit and follow up experimental studies, we found that this incivility is driven by groups rewarding members for defending the group from perceived outgroup attacks, thus incentivizing incivility to “fight fire with fire".
See Abstract
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Occasionally, researchers leave the lab and complete triathlons. (right: Nina Christie USC)