Morality-based Assertion and Homophily on Social Media: A Cultural Comparison between English and Japanese Languages
This research addresses cultural differences in moral expression on social media for linguists and social scientists, but it is incremental as it applies existing moral frameworks to new language data.
The study compared moral behaviors on Twitter between English and Japanese languages, finding that Japanese tweets showed higher Fairness, Ingroup, and Purity, while English tweets expressed more positive emotions across all moral dimensions, and identified homophily patterns in specific moral dimensions for each language.
Moral psychology is a domain that deals with moral identity, appraisals and emotions. Previous work has primarily focused on moral development and the associated role of culture. Knowing that language is an inherent element of a culture, we used the social media platform Twitter to compare moral behaviors of Japanese tweets with English tweets. The five basic moral foundations, i.e., Care, Fairness, Ingroup, Authority and Purity, along with the associated emotional valence were compared between English and Japanese tweets. The tweets from Japanese users depicted relatively higher Fairness, Ingroup, and Purity, whereas English tweets expressed more positive emotions for all moral dimensions. Considering moral similarities in connecting users on social media, we quantified homophily concerning different moral dimensions using our proposed method. The moral dimensions Care, Authority and Purity for English and Ingroup, Authority and Purity for Japanese depicted homophily on Twitter. Overall, our study uncovers the underlying cultural differences with respect to moral behavior in English- and Japanese-speaking users.