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 increasingly social interactions happening online, social media data provides an unprecedented opportunity to assess in-the-wild moral reasoning. We investigate the commonsense aspects of morality in ordinary matters empirically. To this end, we examine data from a Reddit subcommunity (i.e., a subreddit) where an author may describe their behavior in a situation to seek comments about whether that behavior was appropriate. Other users comment to provide judgments and reasoning. We focus on the novel problem of understanding the moral reasoning implicit in user comments about the propriety of an author's behavior. Especially, we explore associations between the common elements of the indicated reasoning and the extractable social factors. Our results suggest the reasoning depends on the author's gender and the topic of a post, such as when expressing anger emotion and using sensible words (e.g., f-ck, hell, and damn) in work-related situations. Moreover, we find that the commonly expressed semantics also depends on commenters' interests.