Bound in Hatred: The role of group-based morality in acts of hate

By J. Hoover, Mohammad Atari, Aida Mostafazadeh Davani, Brendan Kennedy, Gwenyth Portillo-Wightman, Leigh Yeh, D. Kogon, Morteza Dehghani. 2019

Acts of hate have been used to silence, terrorize, and erase marginalized social groups throughout history. The rising rates of these behaviors in recent years underscores the importance of developing a better understanding of when, why, and where they occur. In this work, we present a program of research that suggests that acts of hate may often be best understood not just as responses to threat, but also as morally motivated behaviors grounded in people’s moral values and perceptions of moral violations. As evidence for this claim, we present findings from five studies that rely on a combination of natural language processing, spatial modeling, and experimental methods to investigate the relationship between moral values and acts of hate toward marginalized groups. Across these studies, we find consistent evidence that moral values oriented around ingroup preservation are disproportionately evoked in hate speech, predictive of the county-level prevalence of hate groups, and associated with the belief that acts of hate against marginalized groups are justified. Additional analyses suggest that the association between group-oriented moral values and hate acts against marginalized groups can be partly explained by the belief that these groups have done something morally wrong. By accounting for the role of moralization in acts of hate, this work provides a unified framework for understanding hateful behaviors and the events or dynamics that trigger them.

Subfields: Social Sciences & Humanities

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Citations in the corpus

ToxiGen: A Large-Scale Machine-Generated Dataset for Adversarial and Implicit Hate Speech Detection (2022, background): “We also ﬁnd that the most common framing tactic is “moral judgement”, or questioning the morality of an identity group, which has been linked to toxicity by prior work (Hoover et al., 2019).”
ProsocialDialog: A Prosocial Backbone for Conversational Agents (2022, background): “Additionally, it is highly stressful and unethical to let humans consistently take a spiteful or immoral role in dialogue annotation since it may lead to undesired critical harm (Zim-bardo, 1973).”
Contextualizing Hate Speech Classifiers with Post-hoc Explanation (2020, unknown): “…Silva et al., 2016; Del Vigna12 et al., 2017; Basile et al., 2019), but the relative sparsity of hate speech requires sampling using keywords (e.g., Olteanu et al., 2018) or sampling from environments with unusually high rates of hate speech (e.g., de Gibert et al., 2018; Hoover et al., 2019).”