Graham, J., Haidt, J., & Nosek, B. A. (2009). Liberals and conservatives rely on different sets of moral foundations. Journal of personality and social psychology,96(5), 1029.

In a previous post I reviewed the results and implications of this paper.  This post will focus on the paper’s use of linguistic analysis to identify distinct moral foundations in the texts of liberal and conservative church sermons.  Church sermons were used because sermons are generally written by individuals rather than a collection of writers used for political speeches.

The authors relied mostly on the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count  (LIWC) software program for their text analysis, plus some supplemental word count analysis.  Additional resources are available at their website moralfoundations.org .

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