# Development and Validation of the Japanese Moral Foundations Dictionary

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.00871 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.00871/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 3 Apr 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Values, Ethics, Morals? On the Use of Moral Concepts in NLP Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13915/) (2023)
- [Are Rules Meant to be Broken? Understanding Multilingual Moral Reasoning as a Computational Pipeline with UniMoral](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14083/) (2025)
- [Beyond English: Evaluating Automated Measurement of Moral Foundations in Non-English Discourse with a Chinese Case Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.02451/) (2025)
- [Moral Semantics Survive Machine Translation: Cross-Lingual Evidence from Moral Foundations Corpora](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.22660/) (2026)
- [Morality-based Assertion and Homophily on Social Media: A Cultural Comparison between English and Japanese Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10643/) (2021)
- [MoralCLIP: Contrastive Alignment of Vision-and-Language Representations with Moral Foundations Theory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05696/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The Moral Foundations Dictionary (MFD) is a useful tool for applying the conceptual framework developed in Moral Foundations Theory and quantifying the moral meanings implicated in the linguistic information people convey. However, the applicability of the MFD is limited because it is available only in English. Translated versions of the MFD are therefore needed to study morality across various cultures, including non-Western cultures. The contribution of this paper is two-fold. We developed the first Japanese version of the MFD (referred to as the J-MFD) by introducing a semi-automated method---this serves as a reference when translating the MFD into other languages. We next tested the validity of the J-MFD by analyzing open-ended written texts about the situations that Japanese participants thought followed and violated the five moral foundations. We found that the J-MFD correctly categorized the Japanese participants' descriptions into the corresponding moral foundations, and that the Moral Foundations Questionnaire (MFQ) scores were correlated with the frequency of situations, of total words, and of J-MFD words in the participants' descriptions for the Harm and Fairness foundations. The J-MFD can be used to study morality unique to the Japanese and cultural differences in moral behavior.