An initial assessement of moral attitude dynamic model for defusing culture war tensions

Abstract

[EMBARGOED UNTIL 08/01/2025] This dissertation introduces Moral Attitude Dynamic Model (MADM) for defusing conflicts tensions by incorporating the key constructs of Moral Foundation Theory into The Contingency Theory of Accommodation (Contingency Theory). MADM advances Contingency Theory by incorporating both the key conceptual constructs and methodological approaches of Moral Foundation Theory. Consequently, it allows for real-time tracking and analysis of target public's attitudes towards a certain issue as it allows for the employment of computational methods. Therefore, this model could effectively inform conflicts management and political polarization. Accordingly, MADM extends the application of Contingency Theory in the context of social controversies with a long history. Moreover, this study applies MADM on defusing the tensions of two culture issues (GM food and Abortion) as an initial assessment. Concretely, issue related tweets were scraped through academic API provided by Twitter, and issue supporters' and opponents' tweets were identified by supervised machine learning classifiers for each issue respectively. Distributed Dictionary Representation, a Natural Language Processing tool was adopted for quantify supporters' and opponents' moral stances along the enhanced contingency continuum, the key construct of MADM, and multilevel linear modeling was adopted to investigate the quantified moral stances. Accordingly, pro-GM food and pro-abortion messages were constructed based on the moral stance diagnosis results and an experiment was conducted for message and model effectiveness evaluation. The experiment results show the potential of MADM as an effective tool for conflict management. The moral reframed pro-abortion message constructed based on MADM significantly decreases the participants' anger and the affective polarization. In sum, the results suggest that MADM could be a great tool for monitoring the public's opinion, developing quick responses, and evaluating the intervention. In other words, MADM could be a great tool for mitigating polarization and for real-time conflict management in the ever-changing environment.Includes bibliographical references