Exploring moral conflicts in speech: Multidisciplinary analysis of affect and stress

Abstract

Our moral conscience as the “inner light” that guides us shines brighter during moments of ethical conflicts, when we notice a tension between our many oughts and/or wants. We present the first analyses on speech related stress and affect in accounts of moral conflicts. For our exploratory study, we started with interviews on moral and immoral events at work with entrepreneurs. Qualitative analysis revealed that interviewees do share personal moral conflicts without researchers probing for them. Quantitative analysis showed quiet and even toned voice features when discussing moral conflicts, and speech was laced with emotively positive and negative words, though more negative words were used. Moreover, we find promising results on our automatic classification experiment using speech features. How and what moral conflicts people deliberate on in real-life may be pertinent to future research in affective computing, as well as applications for decision-making support, ethical competences coaching, therapy, and healthy moral selfhood.

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