TY - JOUR
T1 - Moral framing and charitable donation
T2 - integrating exploratory social media analyses and confirmatory experimentation
AU - Hoover, Joe
AU - Johnson, Kate
AU - Boghrati, Reihane
AU - Graham, Jesse
AU - Dehghani, Morteza
N1 - Funding Information:
This work has been funded in part NSF IBSS #1520031.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 The Author(s).
PY - 2018
Y1 - 2018
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - Charitable Donation
KW - Moral Psychology
KW - Natural Language Processing
KW - Social Media
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U2 - 10.1525/collabra.129
DO - 10.1525/collabra.129
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85049810009
SN - 2474-7394
VL - 4
JO - Collabra: Psychology
JF - Collabra: Psychology
IS - 1
M1 - 9
ER -