Morality in the Mundane: Categorizing Moral Reasoning in Real-Life Social Situations

Abstract

Moral reasoning reflects how people acquire and apply moral rules in particular situations. With social interactions increasingly happening online, social media provides an unprecedented opportunity to assess in-the-wild moral reasoning. We investigate the commonsense aspects of morality empirically using data from a Reddit subcommunity (i.e., a subreddit), r/AmITheAsshole, where an author describes their behavior in a situation and seeks comments about whether that behavior was appropriate. A commenter judges and provides reasons for whether an author or others’ behaviors were wrong. We focus on the novel problem of understanding the moral reasoning implicit in user comments about the propriety of an author’s behavior. Specifically, we explore associations between the common elements of the indicated rationale and the extractable social factors. Our results suggest that a moral response depends on the author’s gender and the topic of a post. Typical situations and behaviors include expressing anger emotion and using sensible words (e.g., f-ck, hell, and damn) in work-related situations. Moreover, we find that commonly expressed reasons also depend on commenters’ interests.