Moral Rhetoric in Twitter: A Case Study of the U.S. Federal Shutdown of 2013

Moral Rhetoric in Twitter: A Case Study of the U.S. Federal Shutdown of 2013 Eyal Sagi (eyal@u.northwestern.edu) Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University Evanston, IL 60208 USA Morteza Dehghani (mdehghan@usc.edu) Brain Creativity Institute, University of Southern California Los Angeles, CA 90089 USA Abstract In this paper we apply a computational text analysis technique used for measuring moral rhetoric in text to analyze the moral loadings of tweets. We focus our analysis on tweets regarding the 2013 federal government shutdown; a topic that was at the forefront of U.S. politics in late 2013. Our results demonstrate that the positions of the members of the two major political parties are mirrored by the positions taken by the Twitter communities that are aligned with them. We also analyze retweeting behavior by examining the differences in the moral loadings of intra-community and inter-community retweets. We find that retweets in our corpus favor rhetoric that enhances the cohesion of the community, and emphasize content over moral rhetoric. We argue that the method proposed in this paper contributes to the general study of moral cognition and social behavior. Keywords: Twitter; Moral Reasoning; Social Networking; Political Science; Corpus Statistics. Introduction Social networks now play a major role in the dissemination of opinions and news in the U.S., and Twitter plays a prominent role in this domain. In this paper, we explore the moral rhetoric expressed by tweets. Our analysis focuses on two questions: (1) do different communities of users show different patterns of moral rhetoric, and (2) are tweets that users choose to repeat on their feed (“retweet”) characterized by specific aspects of moral rhetoric that separate them from other tweets. We focus our analysis on tweets relating to a topic that was at the forefront of the U.S. news during October 2013 – The federal government shutdown. Almost since its founding, Twitter.com has been of interest to researchers from a variety of domains. Among others, researchers have investigated Twitter’s community structure (e.g., Java, Song, Finin, & Tseng, 2007), the platform’s potential for data mining (e.g., Sakaki, Okazaki, & Matsuo, 2010) and as a tool for collaboration (e.g., Honey & Herring, 2009). There has also been research on identifying the topics of tweets (e.g., Hong & Davison, 2010) and predicting which tweets will be retweeted (e.g., Hong, Dan, & Davison, 2011). In the present paper, we are concerned with the identifying the moral content of tweets and how such moral rhetoric might relate to the community to which the user belongs and to the likelihood that it will be repeated by other users. We chose to analyze tweets regarding a political issue because prior research has demonstrated that moral rhetoric is prevalent in political debates (e.g., Marietta, Our investigation contributes to the general study of moral cognition by providing an alternative method for measuring moral concerns in a more naturalistic setting compared to self-report survey method and artificial paradigms used in traditional judgment and decision-making experiments. Following Sagi and Dehghani (2013), we define moral rhetoric as “the language used for advocating or taking a moral stance towards an issue by invoking or making salient various moral concerns”. Our analysis of moral rhetoric is grounded in Moral Foundations Theory (Graham et al., 2013; Haidt & Joseph, 2004), which distinguishes between five psychological systems, also thought of as moral intuitions or concerns, which account for various aspects of our moral cognition. Each moral concern is associated with both virtues and vices, as shown below: 1. Care/harm: Caring and protecting individuals from harm. 2. Fairness/cheating: Concerns regarding acts of cooperation, reciprocity and cheating. 3. Loyalty/betrayal: Characterized by expressions of patriotism, self-sacrifice, etc. as well as their vice counterparts such as betrayal, and unfaithfulness to the group. 4. Authority/subversion: Concerns regarding topics such as respect and insubordination. 5. Purity/degradation: Related to sanctity as a virtue and disgust, degradation, and pollution as vices. These five concerns serve separate, but related, social functions. Moreover, it has been shown that the degree of sensitivity to various concerns varies across cultures (Graham, Haidt, & Nosek, 2009). Likewise, Moral Foundations Theory suggests that the sensitivity towards these concerns can change over time and across contexts. Various lines of research have demonstrated differences between liberals and conservatives in the U.S. on the degree to which they attend to the various moral concerns (e.g., Graham et al., 2009; Koleva, Graham, Iyer, Ditto, & Haidt, 2012). Moreover, endorsement of the various foundations are strong predictors of support for political issues such as abortion, immigration, and same-sex marriage (Koleva et al., 2012). Koleva et al. (2012) show that moral foundations are better predictors of such support than more traditional predictors such as ideology and religiosity.