Moral Framing and Charitable Donation: Integrating Exploratory Social Media Analyses and Confirmatory Experimentation

Collabra: Psychology

Reihane Boghrati¹  Morteza Dehghani²  Joe Hoover³  Kate Johnson³  Jesse Graham³ 

[1] Department of Computer Science, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089;Department of Psychology and Computer Science, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089;Department of Psychology, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089

关键词: Moral Psychology;    Charitable Donation;    Natural Language Processing;    Social Media;   

DOI  :  10.1525/collabra.129

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: University of California Press

【 摘 要 】

Do appeals to moral values promote charitable donation during natural disasters? Using Distributed Dictionary Representation, we analyze tweets posted during Hurricane Sandy to explore associations between moral values and charitable donation sentiment. We then derive hypotheses from the observed associations and test these hypotheses across a series of preregistered experiments that investigate the effects of moral framing on perceived donation motivation (Studies 2 & 3), hypothetical donation (Study 4), and real donation behavior (Study 5). Overall, we find consistent positive associations between moral care and loyalty framing with donation sentiment and donation motivation. However, in contrast with people’s perceptions, we also find that moral frames may not actually have reliable effects on charitable donation, as measured by hypothetical indications of donation and real donation behavior. Overall, this work demonstrates that theoretically constrained, exploratory social media analyses can be used to generate viable hypotheses, but also that such approaches should be paired with rigorous controlled experiments.

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【 授权许可】

CC BY