The final speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Yiming Liu, whose focus is on the role of moralised content in online communication. This is often linked to moral contagion theory, but existing research on this is overreliant on observations from English-language studies, which may not translate well to other languages and cultures with their own cultural norms.
This study, therefore, uses the concept of ‘moral circle’: a boundary delimiting who or what deserves moral concern. This represents a series of expanding circles from the self, intimate relationships, the family, the social group, one’s own nation or religious group, all the way through to non-human entities and the planet as such. Are these circles expanding or shrinking as a result of societal changes, though?
Care, fairness, liberty, purity, and authority are often seen as the five basic moral foundations; these can also be projected onto a matrix from collectivism to individualism, and from vice to virtue. Moral boundaries are constantly negotiated through the competing tendencies of prioritising close others (a centripetal force) or advocating for universal inclusion (a centrifugal force).
How do such moral concerns vary across four different countries, then? This study dew on 500 billion words from 5.2 million books since 1500 as available from the Google Books n-Gram dataset; this was used to train a word embedding model for English, German, and French (using data since 1800) as well as Simplified Chinese (using data since 1950). The data were analysed for discussions of morality and conceptualisation of moral circles, respectively building on categories from the Moral Foundations Framework and the Moral Expansiveness Survey.
Different patterns emerged from this, and varied strongly across four target languages; the exact findings are difficult to interpret from this presentation, though. Further research is needed to explore exactly what drives these patterns across these diverse languages, and how they have changed over time.
