The Language of Morality: Differences in Life Satisfaction, Stress, and Purpose

While morality has been pervasively studied utilizing qualitative methods, there has been less work directed towards quantitatively understanding the language of morality and how moral language features relate to other psychological constructs. As part of a longitudinal study investigating purpose development in the context of higher education, this study explores how moral language, distinguished by a beyond-the-self and prosocial orientation, relates to other psychological constructs like stress, life satisfaction, and purpose using 15,460 short answer survey responses from 2,259 college students. These relationships are established by leveraging both dictionary-based and open-vocabulary natural language processing to analyze the linguistic features (words, phrases, and topics) of student life goals. Our findings suggest that goals incorporating morally-oriented language are associated with greater life satisfaction, purpose, and reduced stress. This study also provides a potential rationale for cultivating undergraduate experiences at institutions of higher education that promote purpose and students’ well-being.