Project Vision

The Moral Narratives Workshop aims to kickstart and develop an interdisciplinary, empirical study of moral narratives. One might ask: what do you mean by ‘moral narrative’? Broadly, we are referring to stories told about people’s moral actions and characters. Examples include gossiping about someone at work, competing accounts of the same event in court, political scandals, and stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. We all use moral narratives in our own lives. Many scholars are already studying some aspects of this phenomenon. For some, such as writers, artists, and public figures, moral narratives are their bread and butter.

As we (the organizers) are cognitive scientists, the workshop will heavily feature approaches from core fields within cognitive science, such as psychology, philosophy, and linguistics. However, the goal of this workshop is to expand even wider,  to build a community of scholars, writers, and artists who are interested in aspects of moral narratives, to debate, explore, and raise questions about this rich and fascinating phenomenon.

We aspire towards three goals in building this community. First, we seek to understand how narratives have been theorized across disciplines, especially from diverse cultural and political perspectives. Towards this aim, we will invite participants from fields such as sociology, political science, and communications. Second, we want to expand our tools for experimentally studying moralized communication, building on the work of linguists and cognitive scientists who study language and morality. Finally, we turn to writers and artists for insights into how moral narratives shape individuals and societies in practice. Our broad vision is to braid theoretical, empirical, and creative discoveries across disciplines into fresh insights about what moral narratives are for and how they are made. 

Key questions posed by the workshop concern the format, function, and mechanisms of moral narratives. What are moral narratives and what form do they typically take? How do narrators decide what to say? When and why are narratives told in the first place? We foresee discussing specific topics such as the goals of narrators; pragmatic inferences about audience perception; the role of power, identity, and culture in how narratives are told; moral narratives as explanations about people; interpersonal, public, and self narratives; learning from and learning to tell moral narratives; and the cognitive processes involved in moral narrative construction. We will hear speakers talk about how narratives are studied in different fields, as well as about specific cases of moral narratives in the world (e.g., those about gender, addiction, crime, climate change).

In building this community, we are also experimenting with new modes of scholarly interaction afforded by virtual spaces. We are planning a mix of formal talks and panel discussions, curated to encourage interactions between participants with different expertise and experiences. We will meet approximately every two weeks, and the schedule will be on this website when it is finalized.