A/Prof Yoel Inbar (University of Toronto)

Title: Moral Language Use By U.S. Political Elites

Abstract:

Politicians on the left and right vary in the extent to which they moralize social issues. Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) posits five moral foundations said to constitute the basic building blocks of morality across cultures: the “individualizing” foundations of harm and fairness, and the “binding” foundations of ingroup loyalty, respect for authority, and purity. Past self-report studies suggest that conservatives endorse the binding foundations more strongly than liberals do. However, research does not consistently show that moral language use differs by ideology as predicted by MFT. I’ll present a series of studies in which we use computer-aided natural language analyses to uncover moral language used by U.S. Members of Congress. I’ll discuss differences between liberal and conservative politicians in how much and what kind of moral language they use, and how this changes across time and different issues.

Bio:

Yoel Inbar is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto Scarborough and director of the Morality, Affect, and Politics (MAP) Lab. His research is dedicated to uncovering the basic processes underlying moral thinking and applying this knowledge to understand people’s ideology, beliefs, and reasoning.