How Do Moral Emotions Shape Political Participation? A Cross-Cultural Analysis of Online Petitions Using Language Models
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Understanding the interplay between emotions in language and user behaviors is critical. We study how moral emotions shape the political participation of users based on cross-cultural online petition data. To quantify moral emotions, we employ a context-aware NLP model that is designed to capture the subtle nuances of emotions across cultures. For model training, we construct and share a moral emotion dataset comprising nearly 50,000 petition sentences in Korean and English each, along with emotion labels annotated by a fine-tuned LLM. We examine two distinct types of user participation: general support (i.e., registered signatures of petitions) and active support (i.e., sharing petitions on social media). We discover that moral emotions like other-suffering increase both forms of participation and help petitions go viral, while self-conscious have the opposite effect. The most prominent moral emotion, other-condemning, led to polarizing responses among the audience. In contrast, other-praising was perceived differently by culture; it led to a rise in active support in Korea but a decline in the UK. Our findings suggest that both moral emotions embedded in language and cultural perceptions are critical to shaping the public's political discourse.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".