# The blame game: Understanding blame assignment in social media

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.13352 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13352/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 26 Feb 2023.

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [SocialGaze: Improving the Integration of Human Social Norms in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.08698/) (2024)
- [Conversation Modeling to Predict Derailment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11184/) (2023)
- [A Benchmark for Cross-Domain Argumentative Stance Classification on Social Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.08900/) (2024)
- [Moral Sparks in Social Media Narratives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.19268/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Cognitive and psychological studies on morality have proposed underlying linguistic and semantic factors. However, laboratory experiments in the philosophical literature often lack the nuances and complexity of real life. This paper examines how well the findings of these cognitive studies generalize to a corpus of over 30,000 narratives of tense social situations submitted to a popular social media forum. These narratives describe interpersonal moral situations or misgivings; other users judge from the post whether the author (protagonist) or the opposing side (antagonist) is morally culpable. Whereas previous work focuses on predicting the polarity of normative behaviors, we extend and apply natural language processing (NLP) techniques to understand the effects of descriptions of the people involved in these posts. We conduct extensive experiments to investigate the effect sizes of features to understand how they affect the assignment of blame on social media. Our findings show that aggregating psychology theories enables understanding real-life moral situations. Moreover, our results suggest that there exist biases in blame assignment on social media, such as males are more likely to receive blame no matter whether they are protagonists or antagonists.