Logo
ScienceStack
Table of Contents
Fetching ...
Sign In

Polarization and Morality: Lexical Analysis of Abortion Discourse on Reddit

Tessa Stanier, Hagyeong Shin

TL;DR

The paper addresses how political polarization manifests in language by analyzing abortion discourse on Reddit through two opposing communities, r/prolife and r/prochoice. It employs three NLP approaches grounded in Moral Foundations Theory: proportional frequencies from the Moral Foundations Dictionary, n-gram patterns, and Latent Dirichlet Allocation topic modeling, applied to 145,832 comments collected around the Roe v. Wade discourse. Key findings show no significant differences in overall morality-word frequencies, but substantial differences in how morality terms are contextually framed, as seen in n-grams (e.g., prochoice emphasizing autonomy and care; prolife emphasizing life value and harm) and in topic structures (distinct care/harm-oriented themes). These results highlight that lexical features can index moral framing and polarization, offering a scalable approach to quantify online ideological divides and inform strategies to bridge contentious discourse.

Abstract

This study investigates whether division on political topics is mapped with the distinctive patterns of language use. We collect a total 145,832 Reddit comments on the abortion debate and explore the languages of subreddit communities r/prolife and r/prochoice. With consideration of the Moral Foundations Theory, we examine lexical patterns in three ways. First, we compute proportional frequencies of lexical items from the Moral Foundations Dictionary in order to make inferences about each group's moral considerations when forming arguments for and against abortion. We then create n-gram models to reveal frequent collocations from each stance group and better understand how commonly used words are patterned in their linguistic context and in relation to morality values. Finally, we use Latent Dirichlet Allocation to identify underlying topical structures in the corpus data. Results show that the use of morality words is mapped with the stances on abortion.

Polarization and Morality: Lexical Analysis of Abortion Discourse on Reddit

TL;DR

The paper addresses how political polarization manifests in language by analyzing abortion discourse on Reddit through two opposing communities, r/prolife and r/prochoice. It employs three NLP approaches grounded in Moral Foundations Theory: proportional frequencies from the Moral Foundations Dictionary, n-gram patterns, and Latent Dirichlet Allocation topic modeling, applied to 145,832 comments collected around the Roe v. Wade discourse. Key findings show no significant differences in overall morality-word frequencies, but substantial differences in how morality terms are contextually framed, as seen in n-grams (e.g., prochoice emphasizing autonomy and care; prolife emphasizing life value and harm) and in topic structures (distinct care/harm-oriented themes). These results highlight that lexical features can index moral framing and polarization, offering a scalable approach to quantify online ideological divides and inform strategies to bridge contentious discourse.

Abstract

This study investigates whether division on political topics is mapped with the distinctive patterns of language use. We collect a total 145,832 Reddit comments on the abortion debate and explore the languages of subreddit communities r/prolife and r/prochoice. With consideration of the Moral Foundations Theory, we examine lexical patterns in three ways. First, we compute proportional frequencies of lexical items from the Moral Foundations Dictionary in order to make inferences about each group's moral considerations when forming arguments for and against abortion. We then create n-gram models to reveal frequent collocations from each stance group and better understand how commonly used words are patterned in their linguistic context and in relation to morality values. Finally, we use Latent Dirichlet Allocation to identify underlying topical structures in the corpus data. Results show that the use of morality words is mapped with the stances on abortion.
Paper Structure (13 sections, 1 figure, 2 tables)

This paper contains 13 sections, 1 figure, 2 tables.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Background
  3. Language as an Expression of Political Identity
  4. Linguistic Features of Morality
  5. Morality Words in the Abortion Debate
  6. Research Question and Hypotheses
  7. Data
  8. Results
  9. Frequency
  10. N-grams
  11. LDA
  12. Summary
  13. Ethics Statement

Figures (1)

  • Figure : Table 3: 15 topics extracted from r/prochoice and r/prolife comments. Brackets in each cell indicate a label of a topic selected by researchers. Terms in each topic are italicized and MFD words are boldfaced.