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

Research output: Contribution to journalJournal articleResearchpeer-review

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

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
Number of pages5
ISSN0092-6566
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Apr 2023

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
This investigation was funded by grants from the Carlsberg Foundation (CF16-0444) and the Independent Research Fund Denmark (7024-00057B) to the last author.

Publisher Copyright:
© 2023

    Research areas

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

ID: 336878867