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Heart Beats Brain: Measuring Moral Beliefs Through E-mail Analysis

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Digital Transformation of Collaboration (COINs 2019)

Part of the book series: Springer Proceedings in Complexity ((SPCOM))

Abstract

Moral beliefs are at the heart of governing a person’s behavior. In this paper, we introduce a way to automatically measure a person’s moral values through hidden “honest” signals in the person’s e-mail communication. We measured the e-mail behavior of 26 users through their e-mail interaction, calculating their seven “honest signals of collaboration” (strong leadership, balanced contribution, rotating leadership, responsiveness, honest sentiment, shared context and social capital). These honest signals—in other words, how they answered their e-mails—explained 70% of their moral values measured with the moral foundations survey. In particular, the more positive and less emotional they were in their language, the more they cared about others. We verified the results with a larger e-mail dataset of 655 employees of a services firm, where structural and temporal honest signals explained 67% of emotionality.

I believe that every human mind feels pleasure in doing good to another.

Thomas Jefferson

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Peter A. Gloor

  2. University of Perugia, Perugia, Italy

    Andrea Fronzetti Colladon

Authors
  1. Peter A. Gloor
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  2. Andrea Fronzetti Colladon
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Peter A. Gloor .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Kozminski University, Warsaw, Poland

    Aleksandra Przegalinska

  2. Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA

    Francesca Grippa

  3. MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Peter A. Gloor

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Gloor, P.A., Colladon, A.F. (2020). Heart Beats Brain: Measuring Moral Beliefs Through E-mail Analysis. In: Przegalinska, A., Grippa, F., Gloor, P. (eds) Digital Transformation of Collaboration. COINs 2019. Springer Proceedings in Complexity. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48993-9_7

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