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Researchers often use moral dilemmas to probe the contours of human moral intuitions, but such studies typically take place in depersonalized contexts in which the precise relations between actors are unspecified鈥攁n intentional design to omit the potentially confounding noise of relational contexts. Yet most real-world moral dilemmas occur in the context of various familial, work, or community relationships.

Daniel A. Yudkin and colleagues analyzed a rich dataset of real moral conundrums, the "AITA?" board on the social media site Reddit. Posters to the board describe their own behavior in context, and ask for opinions about whether they are acting like a jerk鈥攁lthough the board's full name includes a more profane synonym. The paper is in PNAS Nexus.

A look at 369,161 posts and 11 million comments using qualitative, quantitative, and machine-learning methods found that dilemmas concerning relational obligations were the most common type of dilemma explored on the board鈥攅.g., spouses worried about being disloyal; roommates seeking fair distributions of rent; parents unsure whether they were doing too much or not enough to care for their children; and so on. More than 80% of posts involved an identifiable relationship between actors.

Looking at the responses to posted dilemmas, the authors found that violations of trust, such as lying and cheating, were, on average, evaluated more negatively than acts of harm. The third most negatively evaluated dilemma type pertained to judgmentalness鈥攁 potential moral wrong often overlooked in academic studies.

According to the authors, the lack of relational context in many studies of morality risks confounding responses as the nature of the relationship between actors may be a constitutive feature of moral cognition.