Designing for Engaging with News using Moral Framing towards Bridging Ideological Divides

Society is showing signs of strong ideological polarization. When pushed to seek perspectives different from their own, people often reject diverse ideas or find them unfathomable. Work has shown that framing controversial issues using the values of the audience can improve understanding of opposing views. In this paper, we present our work designing systems for addressing ideological division through educating U.S. news consumers to engage using a framework of fundamental human values known as Moral Foundations. We design and implement a series of new features that encourage users to challenge their understanding of opposing views, including annotation of moral frames in news articles, discussion of those frames via inline comments, and recommendations based on relevant moral frames. We describe two versions of features---the first covering a suite of ways to interact with moral framing in news, and the second tailored towards collaborative annotation and discussion. We conduct a field evaluation of each design iteration with 71 participants in total over a period of 6-8 days, finding evidence suggesting users learned to re-frame their discourse in moral values of the opposing side. Our work provides several design considerations for building systems to engage with moral framing.

Moralizing Immigration: Political Framing, Moral Conviction, and Polarization in the United States and Denmark

Morally charged rhetoric is commonplace in political discourse on immigration but scholars have not examined how it affects divisions over the issue among the public. To address this gap, we employ preregistered survey experiments in two countries where anti-immigration rhetoric has been prominent: the United States and Denmark. We demonstrate that exposure to moralized messages leads respondents to place greater moral weight on their existing immigration opinions and become more averse to political leaders and, in the United States, social interaction partners who espouse opposite beliefs. This suggests that political moralization contributes to moral conflict and affective polarization. We find no evidence, however, that moral framing produces attitudinal polarization—that is, more extreme immigration opinions. Our study helps make sense of the heightened intensity of anti-immigrant politics even when attitudes are stable. It also suggests a promising avenue for comparative research on affective polarization by shifting the focus from partisanship to the moralization of existing issue disagreements.

Changing Americans’ Attitudes about Immigration: Using Moral Framing to Bolster Factual Arguments

How can the effect of appeals on immigration attitudes be bolstered? Partisans’ tendency to interpret facts consistent with their priors impedes evidence-based persuasion. Accordingly, most prior work finds that favorable information about the impact of immigration has little or no influence on policy preferences. Here we propose that appealing to moral values can bolster the persuasive power of information. Across three experiments (total N = 4,616), we find that an argument based on the value of in-group loyalty, which emphasized that immigrants are critical to America’s economic strength, combined with information about the economic impact of legal immigration, significantly increased Americans’ support for legal immigration. Additionally, we found a significant effect of the moral component of this message, whereas the effect of the information alone was of similar size but only marginally significant. These results show that moral arguments can strengthen the persuasiveness of informational appeals.

Evaluating the Moral Framing of Disaffiliation: Sociological and Pastoral Perspectives on the Rise of the “Nones”

The wave of religious disaffiliation that began in the 1990s in the United States has gone from a concern of pastoral leaders to perhaps the concern of pastoral leaders. This article examines a moral framing of religious disaffiliation—where disaffiliation is seen as a symptom of larger moral struggles in society. After a review of contemporary sociological research on the phenomenon of disaffiliation, its roots and causes, the article explores the thinking of the influential Catholic bishop and media entrepreneur Robert Barron as an example of the moral framing of religious disaffiliation. Barron operates as a “moral entrepreneur” in today’s media-rich context, working to persuade Catholics to eschew certain strains of secular and liberal Catholic thinking in order to embrace traditional Catholicism as part of a moral struggle for the soul of U.S. society. Sociological theory on moral entrepreneurship and moral regulation helps make sense of his position. In the end, however, the causes and processes revealed in sociological research on disaffiliation reveal the moral framing as an inadequate construct for making sense of the actual phenomenon. I conclude by recommending a “historical-pastoral” framing of disaffiliation instead.

Deprivation and Deservingness: Exploring Basic Income in Response to Immigrant Poverty

Research on the economic trends for immigrants to Canada shows a progressive trend towards impoverishment, particularly for racialized groups. This review presents the case that current responses to poverty in Canada are inadequate, and tend to perpetuate the cycles they seek to address by reifying group divides. Building on theories of social exclusion, this MRP explores the potential of basic income to create greater access to social and material capital for otherwise marginalized groups. Finally, by looking at current policy approaches to welfare, public attitudes towards redistribution, and historic BIG trials, the argument is made that with non-moral framing a basic income trial in Canada could be both politically feasible and destigmatizing.

Deprivation and Deservingness: Exploring Basic Income in Response to Immigrant Poverty

Research on the economic trends for immigrants to Canada shows a progressive trend towards impoverishment, particularly for racialized groups. This review presents the case that current responses to poverty in Canada are inadequate, and tend to perpetuate the cycles they seek to address by reifying group divides. Building on theories of social exclusion, this MRP explores the potential of basic income to create greater access to social and material capital for otherwise marginalized groups. Finally, by looking at current policy approaches to welfare, public attitudes towards redistribution, and historic BIG trials, the argument is made that with non-moral framing a basic income trial in Canada could be both politically feasible and destigmatizing.

Moral labels increase cooperation and costly punishment in a Prisoner’s Dilemma game with punishment option

To determine the role of moral norms in cooperation and punishment, we examined the effects of a moral-framing manipulation in a Prisoner’s Dilemma game with a costly punishment option. In each round of the game, participants decided whether to cooperate or to defect. The Prisoner’s Dilemma game was identical for all participants with the exception that the behavioral options were paired with moral labels (“I cooperate” and “I cheat”) in the moral-framing condition and with neutral labels (“A” and “B”) in the neutral-framing condition. After each round of the Prisoner’s Dilemma game, participants had the opportunity to invest some of their money to punish their partners. In two experiments, moral framing increased moral and hypocritical punishment: participants were more likely to punish partners for defection when moral labels were used than when neutral labels were used. When the participants’ cooperation was enforced by their partners’ moral punishment, moral framing did not only increase moral and hypocritical punishment but also cooperation. The results suggest that moral framing activates a cooperative norm that specifically increases moral and hypocritical punishment. Furthermore, the experience of moral punishment by the partners may increase the importance of social norms for cooperation, which may explain why moral framing effects on cooperation were found only when participants were subject to moral punishment.