Development of the Japanese Moral Foundations Dictionary: Procedures and Applications

The Moral Foundations Dictionary (MFD) is a useful tool for applying the conceptual framework developed in Moral Foundation Theory and quantify the moral meanings implicated in linguistic information people convey with. However, the applicability of the MFD is limited because it is available only in English. Therefore, translated versions of the MFD are needed to study morality across various cultures, including non-Western cultures. The contribution of this paper is two-fold. First, we developed the Japanese version of the MFD (referred to as the J-MFD) by introducing a semi-automated method; the J-MFD is publicly available online and our procedures serve as a reference when translating the MFD into other languages. Second, we applied the J-MFD by analyzing social media data written in English and Japanese. We found that English users are more likely to talk about immorality-related topics online than Japanese users and that English and Japanese users emphasize different moral categories. The J-MFD helps to explore morality unique to Japanese and can be useful for investigating cultural differences in moral behaviors.