The Moral Debater: A Study on the Computational Generation of Morally Framed Arguments

TL;DR

This paper explores the automatic generation of morally framed arguments based on moral foundation theory and evaluates their impact on liberals and conservatives, showing increased influence when prior beliefs are challenged.

Contribution

It introduces a system for generating morally framed arguments and provides empirical evidence of their effectiveness across different political audiences.

Findings

Morally framed arguments influence audiences more when prior beliefs are challenged.

The system effectively generates arguments focusing on different moral foundations.

Audience impact varies based on prior beliefs and moral framing.

Abstract

An audience's prior beliefs and morals are strong indicators of how likely they will be affected by a given argument. Utilizing such knowledge can help focus on shared values to bring disagreeing parties towards agreement. In argumentation technology, however, this is barely exploited so far. This paper studies the feasibility of automatically generating morally framed arguments as well as their effect on different audiences. Following the moral foundation theory, we propose a system that effectively generates arguments focusing on different morals. In an in-depth user study, we ask liberals and conservatives to evaluate the impact of these arguments. Our results suggest that, particularly when prior beliefs are challenged, an audience becomes more affected by morally framed arguments.