How Americans Judge: A Topology of Moral Communities

Abstract

Despite research on differences in moral logics across demographic categories, the overall community structure in how Americans share standards of judgment, and hence a fundamental basis for categorical inequalities, remains unclear. To identify communities of shared moral logics, we inductively code judgments in interview transcripts from a probability sample of Americans. We then identify clusters in a network induced by similarities in how Americans judge. We find that competence and prosociality emerge as primary logics by which Americans judge others positively. Gender is the strongest predictor for which moral logics Americans deploy in daily life. Finally, different communities emerge in judgments of institutions, or in negative judgments, suggesting that Americans deploy various moral logics depending on context, which suggests possibilities for bridging categorical divides.

Keywords

• moral logics
• judgment
• praise and denigration
• networks