# Less Is Moral: A CHARMing Framework for Moral Foundations Detection in Endorsement Behaviour

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.03330 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.03330/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [FiLM: Visual Reasoning with a General Conditioning Layer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.07871/) (2017)
- [Aligning AI With Shared Human Values](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.02275/) (2020)
- [ERASER: A Benchmark to Evaluate Rationalized NLP Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.03429/) (2019)
- [Social Chemistry 101: Learning to Reason about Social and Moral Norms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00620/) (2020)
- [Towards Faithful Model Explanation in NLP: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.11326/) (2022)
- [The Moral Integrity Corpus: A Benchmark for Ethical Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03021/) (2022)
- [MoralBERT: A Fine-Tuned Language Model for Capturing Moral Values in Social Discussions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07678/) (2024)
- [A Data Fusion Framework for Multi-Domain Morality Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02144/) (2023)
- [As an AI Language Model, "Yes I Would Recommend Calling the Police": Norm Inconsistency in LLM Decision-Making](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14812/) (2024)
- [MFTCXplain: A Multilingual Benchmark Dataset for Evaluating the Moral Reasoning of LLMs through Multi-hop Hate Speech Explanation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.19073/) (2025)
- [MoVa: Towards Generalizable Classification of Human Morals and Values](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.24216/) (2025)
- [LibertyMFD: A Lexicon to Assess the Moral Foundation of Liberty](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.06750/) (2022)
- [Self-Explaining Hate Speech Detection with Moral Rationales](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.03481/) (2026)
- [The Moral Gap of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.18523/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Moral language plays a central role in shaping online endorsement and the diffusion of information, yet existing moral foundation detection systems often suffer from poor cross-domain generalization, weak rationale grounding, and reliance on costly prompting-based large language models (LLMs). We introduce CHARM, a MAC- and Hate-speech-Aware Rationalealigned Moral foundation detection framework built on a lightweight fine-tuned LLM, which integrates complementary moral grounding, rationale alignment, and polarity-aware hate speech signals to support more robust and faithful moral prediction. Unlike prior dictionary-, fine-tune-, or prompt-based detectors, which decouple computation from psychological theory, CHARM is built so that each component -- MAC cross-attention, rationale alignment, and hate-speech modulation -- operationalizes a distinct psychological construct. Using a 30% subsample of the MFTC, MFRC, and News training pools together with the richer supervision in MFTCXplain, CHARM improves AUC by up to 15.3% in-domain, surpasses the supervised baselines on every out-of-domain dataset in both AUC and F1, and offers a scalable, low-cost alternative to prompting-based LLM detectors. We further apply CHARM to large-scale COVID-19 discourse on Twitter and show that moral value alignment is strongly associated with online endorsement behavior. By making moral framing measurable at scale, CHARM offers a practical tool for studying the spread of morally charged misinformation. Code and additional materials: https://github.com/HuixiangF/CHARM/.