The relation between Honesty-Humility and moral concerns as expressed in language

Karolina A. Ścigała*, Ioanna Arkoudi, Christoph Schild, Stefan Pfattheicher, Ingo Zettler

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journal/Conference contribution in journal/Contribution to newspaperJournal articleResearchpeer-review

2 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Does the basic trait Honesty-Humility predict the type of moral concerns people express in language? We explore whether Honesty-Humility relates to the expression of five moral concerns in language—namely, care/harm, justice/fairness, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation—as conceptualized by the Moral Foundations Theory. Using Natural Language Processing, we screened 17,217 (un)ethical justifications—i.e., reasons for behaving (un)ethically—for the presence of the five moral concerns (N = 901). We found that Honesty-Humility related positively to justice/fairness concerns, but it did not relate to care/harm, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation concerns. Our findings thus suggest that justice/fairness concerns might serve as one of the mechanisms relating Honesty-Humility to anti- and prosocial behavior.

Original languageEnglish
Article number104351
JournalJournal of Research in Personality
Volume103
ISSN0092-6566
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Apr 2023

Keywords

  • Ethical justifications
  • HEXACO
  • Honesty-Humility
  • Moral Foundations
  • Natural Language Processing
  • NLP
  • Self-serving justifications
  • Unethical justifications

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