The power of moral words: Understanding framing effects in extreme Dictator games using sentiment analysis and moral judgments
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Recent work shows that people are not solely motivated by the economic consequences of the available actions, but they also have moral preferences for `doing the right thing', independently of its economic consequences. Here we add to this literature with two experiments. In Study 1 (N=567) we implement an extreme dictator game in which dictators either get 0.50 and another person gets nothing, or the other way around (i.e., the other person gets 0.50 and the dictator gets nothing). We experimentally manipulate the words describing the available actions using six words, from very negative (e.g., stealing) to very positive (e.g., donating) connotations. Our hypothesis is that people are reluctant to make actions described using words with a negative connotation, and are eager to make actions described using words with a positive connotation, independently of their economic consequences. As predicted, we find that the connotation of the word has a U-shaped effect on pro-sociality. Moreover, we show that the overall pattern of results, the U-shape, but not its details, can be explained using a technique from Computational Linguistics known as Sentiment Analysis. In Study 2 (N=413, pre-registered) we make a step forward and we collect the self-reported moral judgment and feeling associated to each of the six words used in Study 1. We show that the rate of pro-sociality in Study 1 can be predicted from the moral judgments and the feelings in Study 2 via Krupka & Weber's utility function. In sum, our findings provide additional evidence for the existence and relevance of moral preferences, confirm the usefulness of Krupka & Weber's utility function, and suggest that building bridges from computational linguistics to behavioral science can contribute to our understanding of human decision making.
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