Evidence map›Paper›PMID 37045974›Full record

ArticleScientific reports2023

The paucity of morality in everyday talk.

Mohammad Atari, Matthias R Mehl, Jesse Graham, John M Doris, Norbert Schwarz, Aida Mostafazadeh Davani, Ali Omrani, Brendan Kennedy, Elaine Gonzalez, Nikki Jafarzadeh and 11 more

Abstract read
PubMed Full text at PMC Publisher
In one paragraph

Article in Scientific reports, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.

0numbers the graph read from it
0cells of the map it votes in
4citing papers in PubMed
–field-weighted citation impact
1 · What the graph read from it

What it found

Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.

The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.

2 · The registry

The trial behind it

Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.

Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.

3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

4 citing papers in PubMed.

  1. An exploration of basic human values in 38 million obituaries over 30 years.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025
    Article
  2. GPT is an effective tool for multilingual psychological text analysis.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024
    Article
  3. Review
  4. Article
4 · The record

Corrections and comments

PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.

5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

21 authors.

Mohammad AtariDepartment of Psychology, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA. matari@fas.harvard.edu.
Matthias R MehlDepartment of Psychology, University of Arizona, Tucson, USA.
Jesse GrahamDepartment of Management, David Eccles School of Business, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, USA.
John M DorisDyson School of Applied Economics and Management, Johnson College of Business, Cornell University, Ithaca, USA.
Norbert SchwarzDepartment of Psychology, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA.
Aida Mostafazadeh DavaniDepartment of Computer Science, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA.
Ali OmraniDepartment of Computer Science, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA.
Brendan KennedyDepartment of Computer Science, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA.
Elaine GonzalezDepartment of Psychology, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA.
Nikki JafarzadehDepartment of Psychology, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA.
Alyzeh HussainDepartment of Psychology, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA.
Arineh MirinjianDepartment of Psychology, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA.
Annabelle MaddenDepartment of Psychology, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA.
Rhea BhatiaDepartment of Psychology, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA.
Alexander BurchDepartment of Psychology, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA.
Allison HarlanDepartment of Psychology, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA.
David A SbarraDepartment of Psychology, University of Arizona, Tucson, USA.
Charles L RaisonDepartment of Psychiatry, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, USA.
Suzanne A MoseleyMinnesota Epilepsy Group, Roseville, USA.
Angelina J PolsinelliDepartment of Neurology, Indiana University School of Medicine, Indianapolis, USA.
Morteza DehghaniDepartment of Psychology, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA.ORCID 0000-0002-9478-4365

Funding

No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.

6 · The paper itself

Abstract

Given its centrality in scholarly and popular discourse, morality should be expected to figure prominently in everyday talk. We test this expectation by examining the frequency of moral content in three contexts, using three methods: (a) Participants' subjective frequency estimates (N = 581); (b) Human content analysis of unobtrusively recorded in-person interactions (N = 542 participants; n = 50,961 observations); and (c) Computational content analysis of Facebook posts (N = 3822 participants; n = 111,886 observations). In their self-reports, participants estimated that 21.5% of their interactions touched on morality (Study 1), but objectively, only 4.7% of recorded conversational samples (Study 2) and 2.2% of Facebook posts (Study 3) contained moral content. Collectively, these findings suggest that morality may be far less prominent in everyday life than scholarly and popular discourse, and laypeople, presume.

Indexed as

CommunicationMoralsHumansSelf ReportSocial Networking

Identifiers

PMID37045974
PMCPMC10097712

What OpenQuestion holds

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Registered trials

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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.