Joe Hoover

University of Southern California | USC · Department of Psychology

Infectious diseases have been an impending threat to the survival of individuals and groups throughout our evolutionary history. As a result, humans have developed psychological pathogen-avoidance mechanisms and groups have developed societal norms that respond to the presence of disease-causing microorganisms in the environment. In this work, we d...

We present the Gab Hate Corpus (GHC), consisting of 27,665 posts from the social network service gab.com, each annotated for the presence of “hate-based rhetoric” by a minimum of three annotators. Posts were labeled according to a coding typology derived from a synthesis of hate speech definitions across legal precedent, previous hate speech coding...

Understanding motivations underlying acts of hatred are essential for developing strategies to prevent such extreme behavioral expressions of prejudice (EBEPs) against marginalized groups. In this work, we investigate the motivations underlying EBEPs as a function of moral values. Specifically, we propose EBEPs may often be best understood as moral...

Language is a psychologically rich medium for human expression and communication. While language usage has been shown to be a window into various aspects of people's social worlds, including their personality traits and everyday environment, its correspondence to people's moral concerns has yet to be considered. Here, we examine the relationship be...

The growing prominence of online hate speech is a threat to a safe and just society. This endangering phenomenon requires collaboration across the sciences in order to generate evidence-based knowledge of, and policies for, the dissemination of hatred in online spaces. To foster such collaborations, here we present the Gab Hate Corpus (GHC), consis...

Research has shown that accounting for moral sentiment in natural language can yield insight into a variety of on- and off-line phenomena such as message diffusion, protest dynamics, and social distancing. However, measuring moral sentiment in natural language is challenging, and the difficulty of this task is exacerbated by the limited availabilit...

The geographic distribution of psychological constructs has long been an area of focus for psychological researchers. Recently, however, there has been increased interest in investigations of the so-called subnational distribution of psychological variables, which focus on localized groupings of individuals within spatial units, such as counties or...

Meaning depends on context. This applies in obvious cases like deictics or sarcasm as well as more subtle situations like framing or persuasion. One key aspect of this is the identity of the participants in an interaction. Our interpretation of an utterance shifts based on a variety of factors, including personal history, background knowledge, and...

In recent years, protesters in the United States have clashed violently with police and counter-protesters on numerous occasions1–3. Despite widespread media attention, little scientific research has been devoted to understanding this rise in the number of violent protests. We propose that this phenomenon can be understood as a function of an indiv...

Do appeals to moral values promote charitable donation during natural disasters? Using Distributed Dictionary Representation, we analyze tweets posted during Hurricane Sandy to explore associations between moral values and charitable donation sentiment. We then derive hypotheses from the observed associations and test these hypotheses across a seri...

In this paper, we address the problem of detecting expressions of moral values in tweets using content analysis. This is a particularly challenging problem because moral values are often only implicitly signaled in language, and tweets contain little contextual information due to length constraints. To address these obstacles, we present a novel ap...

Drawing from a common lexicon of semantic units, humans fashion narratives whose meaning transcends that of their individual utterances. However, while brain regions that represent lower-level semantic units, such as words and sentences, have been identified, questions remain about the neural representation of narrative comprehension, which involve...

The syntax and semantics of human language can illuminate many individual psychological differences and important dimensions of social interaction. Accordingly, psychological and psycholinguistic research has begun incorporating sophisticated representations of semantic content to better understand the connection between word choice and psychologic...

Theory-driven text analysis has made extensive use of psychological concept dictionaries, leading to a wide range of important results. These dictionaries have generally been applied through word count methods which have proven to be both simple and effective. In this paper, we introduce Distributed Dictionary Representations (DDR), a method that a...

Significance For nearly 50 y social scientists have observed that across cultures and languages people use more positive words than negative words, a phenomenon referred to as “linguistic positivity bias” (LPB). Although scientists have proposed multiple explanations for this phenomenon—explanations that hinge on mechanisms ranging from cognitive b...

As human activity and interaction increasingly take place online, the digital residues of these activities provide a valuable window into a range of psychological and social processes. A great deal of progress has been made toward utilizing these opportunities; however, the complexity of managing and analyzing the quantities of data currently avail...

Does sharing moral values encourage people to connect and form communities? The importance of moral homophily (love of same) has been recognized by social scientists, but the types of moral similarities that drive this phenomenon are still unknown. Using both large-scale, observational social-media analyses and behavioral lab experiments, the autho...