Week 1: Introduction to Moral Foundations Theory

Morality as a subject has implications to a lot of other subjects and can be used to explain real world phenomena. The theory of Moral Foundations (MFT), which divides morality into five pillars: care, fairness, loyalty, sanctity, and authority, allows us to explain the rhetoric of any speaker through morality. Using data mining, natural language processing, and computer vision frameworks, any piece of rhetoric is able to be empirically explained leading to further conclusions about authors and speakers.

Connecting morality to the realm of politics allows social scientists to explore and explain how political officials think. In an election year, I thought it would be insightful to look into presidential rhetoric, especially presidential candidate debates. In the past few election cycles, the popularity of presidential debates has grown exponentially. Especially in the age of mass media, the importance of these debates has also grown significantly with viewers’ ideals being subject to change based on how candidates talk about themes and ideas brought up during these debates. Analyzing debates through the lens of the MFT allows trends and patterns to be drawn amongst presidential candidates.

My hope is that I will be able to identify certain trends amongst the pillars of Moral Foundations that can show that successful presidential candidates going back to 1980 emphasize certain common emotions and ideals that lead to their victory. I hypothesize that the pillar of fairness will lead to significant findings. This is mainly due to the fact that successful presidential candidates are usually able to use their fairness ideals to sway voters from the opposite side as well as independent voters to their campaign.