An Empirical Exploration of Moral Foundations Theory in Partisan News Sources

An Empirical Exploration of Moral Foundations Theory in Partisan News Sources Dean Fulgoni1, Jordan Carpenter2, Lyle Ungar1,2, Daniel Preot¸iuc-Pietro1,2 1Computer and Information Science, 3330 Walnut St.,Philadelphia, PA 19104 2Positive Psychology Center, 3701 Market St., Philadelphia, PA 19104 University of Pennsylvania dfulgoni@seas.upenn.edu, jordac@sas.upenn.edu, ungar@cis.upenn.edu, danielpr@sas.upenn.edu Abstract News sources frame issues in different ways in order to appeal or control the perception of their readers. We present a large scale study of news articles from partisan sources in the US across a variety of different issues. We first highlight that differences between sides exist by predicting the political leaning of articles of unseen political bias. Framing can be driven by different types of morality that each group values. We emphasize differences in framing of different news building on the moral foundations theory quantified using hand crafted lexicons. Our results show that partisan sources frame political issues differently both in terms of words usage and through the moral foundations they relate to. Keywords: Text Mining, Document Classification, Text Categorisation 1. Introduction Framing is a central concept in political science and jour- nalism (Goffman, 1974). When studying news, each source frames the news within a particular viewpoint, aiming for a change in the perception of the issue among the read- ers (Scheufele, 1999). Although political and cultural beliefs may be formed and developed through reason and careful thought, it is more common that they stem from automatic, emotional judgments (Haidt, 2001). However, these imme- diate responses often differ across people; the same action may inspire feelings of disgust, happiness, and anger in different observers. These contrasting emotional reactions lead to drastically different assessments of the acceptability or appropriateness of the action. For instance, the issue of police violence against minorities can be thought of as a conflict of values: liberals abhor the unfairness of violence instigated against a marginalized social group, while con- servatives hate the anti-authoritarian, public disrespect of legitimate authority figures. We perform a large scale analysis of news from partisan news sources across a wide variety of issues. To date, po- litical orientation prediction has been focused mostly on predicting the leaning of individual users (Rao et al., 2010; Pennacchiotti and Popescu, 2011; Al Zamal et al., 2012; Cohen and Ruths, 2013; Volkova et al., 2014; Volkova et al., 2015; Sylwester and Purver, 2015), mostly on social media. While recently, computational approaches have been used to study framing (Tsur et al., 2015; Baumer et al., 2015; Card et al., 2015), little empirical work has been performed to study deeper psychological factors that cause this linguistic divergence (Yano et al., 2010) and analyses have mostly focused on data from political actors (Nguyen et al., 2015). Social psychology research suggests that differences in the frames used follows the different values that the groups ad- here to, and that these values span different issues. Moral Foundations Theory (Haidt and Joseph, 2004; Haidt and Gra- ham, 2007; Graham et al., 2009) was developed to model and explain these differences. Under this theory, there are a …

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