Interdepartmental Talk: "Am I the A-hole? A Large-Scale Investigation of Everyday Moral Dilemmas" with Daniel Yudkin

Please mark your calendars for this event hosted by The Murphy Institute's Center for Ethics, the Tulane Psychology Department, and the Tulane Philosophy Department:

Daniel Yudkin is a social psychologist who studies how people decide between right and wrong, and how these decisions impact relationships, organizations, and society. They are a Senior Advisor at More in Common and a Visiting Scholar at the Wharton School. Yudkin's research has been published in scientific journals such as Nature Communications, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Nature Human Behavior.

Yudkin's work uses insights from social science to understand and bridge political divides. Their research reports (Hidden Tribes: A Study of America’s Polarized Landscape and The Perception Gap: How False Impressions are Pulling Americans Apart) have been highlighted in multiple Presidential campaigns and featured in over 1,500 news articles, including the front page of The New York Times. They have given interviews about this research on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal and BBC World News, and authored an accompanied opinion piece about the work in The New York Times entitled “The Psychology of Political Polarization.”

SUMMARY:

Am I the A-hole? A Large-Scale Investigation of Everyday Moral Dilemmas

Should I sacrifice one life to save five? Such questions provide provocative tests of the boundaries of our moral intuitions, but may not fully reflect the nuanced web of moral questions people confront in daily life. We combined state-of-the-art tools from machine learning with survey-based methods in psychology to investigate a large-scale repository of everyday moral dilemmas: the “Am I the Asshole?” forum on Reddit. In 369,161 descriptions (“posts”) and 11M evaluations (“comments”), users described a wide variety of dilemmas, ranging from broken promises to privacy violations. The types of dilemmas people experienced depended on the interpersonal closeness of the interactants, with some dilemmas (e.g., politeness) being more prominent in distant-other interactions, and others (e.g., relational transgressions) more prominent in close-other interactions. A longitudinal investigation showed that shifts in social interactions prompted by the “shock” event of the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in predictable shifts in the moral landscape. Over/all, the data highlights the diversity of moral dilemmas experienced in daily life, and helps to build a moral psychology grounded in the vagaries of everyday experience.