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Agent-Based Moral Interaction Simulations in Imbalanced Polarized Settings

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Social, Cultural, and Behavioral Modeling (SBP-BRiMS 2023)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 14161))

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Abstract

Rising US polarization in recent years has negatively impacted many friend and family relationships. To determine the best moral strategies for facilitating cross-party communication, we create an agent-based simulation underpinned by Moral Foundations Theory to model small-group moral conversations where the majority of agents align with either liberal or conservative views. We find, contrary to what moral re-framing research has assumed, that loyalty may be the best moral foundation for facilitating cross-party communication. More research is needed to understand the depolarizing effects of moral arguments in group settings.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    As each observation can be assigned multiple virtues or vices from each annotator, we construct a table of ’virtue’ and ’vice’ probabilities using the annotators’ label distribution, i.e. the percentage of annotations assigned to virtue or vice for each observation. We then calculate the pearson correlation coefficient between virtue/ vice probabilities and 2 binary sentiment variables (positive and negative).

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Acknowledgements

The research for this paper was supported in part by the Office of Naval Research (ONR), MURI: Persuasion, Identity, & Morality in Social-Cyber Environments, and ONR Scalable Tools for Social Media Assessment under grants N000142112749 and N00014-21-1-2229. It was also supported by the center for Informed Democracy and Social-cybersecurity (IDeaS) and the center for Computational Analysis of Social and Organizational Systems (CASOS) at Carnegie Mellon University. The views and conclusions are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the ONR or the US Government.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA

    Evan M. Williams & Kathleen M. Carley

Authors
  1. Evan M. Williams
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  2. Kathleen M. Carley
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Evan M. Williams .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Army Cyber Institute, United States Military Academy, West Point, NY, USA

    Robert Thomson

  2. Creighton University, Omaha, NE, USA

    Samer Al-khateeb

  3. Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN, USA

    Annetta Burger

  4. Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburg, PA, USA

    Patrick Park

  5. Army Cyber Institute, United States Military Academy, West Point, NY, USA

    Aryn A. Pyke

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Williams, E.M., Carley, K.M. (2023). Agent-Based Moral Interaction Simulations in Imbalanced Polarized Settings. In: Thomson, R., Al-khateeb, S., Burger, A., Park, P., A. Pyke, A. (eds) Social, Cultural, and Behavioral Modeling. SBP-BRiMS 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14161. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43129-6_14

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43129-6_14

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-43128-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-43129-6

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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