[SOC Colloquium] Moral Representations – What Are They? How To Identify Them? And What To Do With Them?
Speaker
Dr. René WeberLocation
Psych East, 3834Info
Understanding morality is central to understanding human behavior, cognition, and culture. Narratives, one of the oldest forms of human expression, frequently convey moral themes that resonate with audiences across time and location. This talk delves into moral representations, exploring their essence, methods for identification, and practical applications. First, I will define moral representations as the ways in which moral principles, values, and conflicts are depicted in textual and audio-visual narratives, and encoded in the brain. Drawing on Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) and Morality as Cooperation Theory (MAC), I will introduce into the complexity of extracting moral representations from stories with high reliability and validity, and present UCSB’s Moral Narrative Analyzer (MoNA) platform. Next, I will explore the neural basis of moral representations, focusing on the centuries old question of whether the brain uses domain general or specialized networks to process moral representations. Finally, I will demonstrate how moral representations can be used to predict diverse human cognitions and behaviors ranging from the choice of language to news sharing behavior, misinformation detection, and story engagement. By the end of the presentation, I hope that the audience will gain a deeper appreciation of moral representations as a critical mechanism that shapes our relationship with narratives and our broader social world and that this appreciation has the potential to open new avenues for collaborative research within the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences and perhaps across campus.
