New project: Moralisation of Marine Resources

📣 I’m excited to announce a new project 📣

As part of my postdoctoral research at CSIRO, I’ll be exploring public views of marine resources.

👟 The first steps of this project will review how marine resources become entwined with moral judgements.

Why study public views of marine resources?

Marine resources and space are a heated area of conservation, economic growth, livelihood, and employment. Industry, government, academia, and the public (and different subgroups amongst them) will inevitably hold different expectations, aspirations, and concerns about how society should use marine resources. If not properly managed, concerns and unfulfilled aspirations may erode public acceptance of industry activity and government policy.

Concerns, fears, and expectations are social constructs. They arise within groups when people share knowledge and opinions, drawing on past experiences, analogies, aspirations about the future, perceptions of costs and benefits and power relations, among other drivers. At times, these fears and expectations feature in public discourse, such as traditional media, social media, and academia, where they develop into narratives defining a problem in novel or pre-existing terms. Some of the most divisive narratives are moral. That is, discussions can become embedded with core beliefs and convictions concerning what is right and wrong. This transforms discussions of a specific marine resource to discussions of society and identity. As a result, people who hold moralised perspectives tend to be harder to persuade¹ and more hostile to those with opposing views².

Social media is particularly fertile ground for moralisation. Moralised content is more likely to receive comments, and these comments tend to be moralised³. This effect, known as a moral contagion, suggests moralised discourse is likely to proliferate through social media networks. But we know little about how moralised discourse evolves over long time periods and what events might trigger lasting changes in the way the public moralise marine issues. For this reason, I’ll be exploring how and which marine resources are moralised. If this sounds interesting to you, please get in touch.

How do people moralise marine resources?

Moral Foundations Theory suggests there are five ways in which an issue may be moralised. The basis for moral concerns are ‘foundational’, in the sense that they are recurrent themes that transcend issues and societies. The foundation of care reflects virtues of kindness and gentleness, featured in environmental concerns about harming ‘mother earth’, animal life, and fellow humans. The foundation of fairness reflects virtues of justice, rights, and reciprocity, featured in environmental concerns about justice for future generations who might carry the cost of today’s generation. The foundation of loyalty reflects virtues of patriotism and self-sacrifice for one’s in-group, featured in concerns that national economic performance may be weakened to sustain the environment. The foundation of respect reflects virtues of leadership and followership, featured in concerns about traditions surrounding natural resources. The foundation of sanctity reflects an eclectic range of virtues of cleanliness, holiness, and self-control, featured in environmental concerns for pollution and religious concerns for the environment.

An illustration of Moral Foundations Theory created by Aprilia Muktirina CC BY 4.0

As part of this research, I’ll be examining moral content at different granular levels using a natural language processing algorithm. At the broadest level, I’ll explore whether discussions tap into any moral concern. At the most granular level, I’ll explore what specific moral foundations are involved in discussions.

What data will be used?

I’ll be using data from Twitter. If you have ever posted a tweet about a marine resource, your data might be used in this study. For now, I will be using an archive of Australian tweets curated by CSIRO. In the future, I might use Twitter’s application programming interface (API) to access tweets from across the globe.

Twitter once offered researchers liberal access to data for free. Now, Twitter’s API is prohibitively expensive, costing upwards of $42,000 per month for most research purposes. This change has reduced Twitter’s transparency and accountability, obstructing research on democracy, public health, and public goods⁴. I hope Twitter will reconsider their position. If you have the same hope, please consider signing this letter by the Coalition for Independent Technology Research to call on Twitter and policymakers for reliable access to data.

How privacy will be protected?

On many social media platforms, such as Twitter, Australians are protected by the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) (Privacy Act)⁵. This project will handle information in accordance with the Privacy Act and the National Health & Medical Research Council (NH&MRC) National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research (2007, updated 2018), or as otherwise required by law.

For this project and related scientific research, personal information included in Twitter data, such as the content of tweets and user names, will be collected. Although most Twitter data will not contain sensitive information, some information collected may be sensitive, such as text indicating ethnicity, images of people, or audio of voices. Disclosing this information to other parties is within Twitter’s purview, as per their terms and conditions for users. Consequently, this information will be collected without participant consent to this specific project.

Tweets from public figures and organisations may be shared verbatim, such as quoted in publications (e.g., peer-reviewed publications in academic journals). For other users, results from the project will be de-identified and/or aggregated. While CSIRO will make all attempts to ensure that these users cannot be reidentified from the information contained within the publications, this risk can never be completely removed. It is possible that a user may be able to be reidentified within the publications due to the tweets being available in a public forum.

For information about how Twitter generally handle personal information, please refer to the requirements for accessing Twitter data. If you use Twitter and would like to avoid your Twitter data being used for research, consider deleting tweets or activating a protected status.

For further information on how CSIRO handles personal information and CSIRO’s access, correction, and complaints process please read the privacy policy available on CSIRO’s website or by contacting the privacy team at privacy@csiro.au.

This proposed research has been approved by CSIRO’s Human Research Ethics Committee (reference number: 180/22).

Footnotes

1. Rabia I. Kodapanakkal and colleagues have conducted experiments on the impact of moral and non-moral language on attitudes.

2. Kristin N. Garrett and Alexa Bankert explored how moral conviction heightens tensions between American partisans.

3. This is explored in work by William Brady and colleagues and Curtis Puryear’s team.

4. The changes and impacts are described in more detail in an April letter by the Coalition for Independent Technology Research.

5. For more information on Australian’s privacy rights on social media, please read this webpage by the Australian Government’s Office of the Australian Information Commissioner.