Each sport has a unique moral culture: evidence from data mining moral vocabulary from transcribed athlete interviews

Although sports are popular in North America, only a small research base examines the moral cultures of different sports. In this study, it was hypothesized that different sports have distinct moral cultures, that contact sports emphasize the care versus harm foundation from Moral Foundations Theory more than noncontact sports, and that contact sports emphasize morality more than noncontact sports in general. To investigate these questions, a corpus of transcribed athlete interviews was analyzed in accordance with the Moral Foundations Dictionary (MFD). A one-way ANOVA revealed that the seven sports examined (auto racing, baseball, basketball, football, golf, hockey, and tennis) significantly differed in their respective emphases on each of the moral foundations, as defined by the frequency of words from corresponding sections of the MFD used in that sport’s interviews relative to the total number of words in the interviews (care: F=108.1, sd=0.536; authority: F=46.63, sd=0.694; fairness: F=13.94, sd=0.314; purity: F=16.78, sd=0.240; ingroup: F=27.74, sd=0.492; p<0.001 for all foundations). T-tests were used to compare contact and noncontact sports’ relative frequencies of moral language use from the care category as well as their overall moral language use. The differences between contact and noncontact sports’ relative emphases on the care foundation, and morality in general, were both found to be significant (t=456.8, sd=0.1, p