Which Socio-Economic Indicators Influence Collective Morality? Big Data Analysis on Online Chinese Social Media

The relationship between Socio-economic factors and morality remains controversial. Previous research has found that wealth makes people unethical, while other research suggests that poverty is a good predictor of unethical behavior. The relationship between other social factors is also ambiguous. In the current study, the relationship between socio-economic indicators reported by the National Bureau of Statistics of the People’s Republic of China and moral motivation revealed from online social networking, Sina Weibo was constructed. Using data from the whole year of 2013 Sina Weibo microblogs, we found that the poor and rich areas were more willing to behave immorally, and the relation between GDP and collective moral motivation was curved. Also, normal people were less ethical when prices increased than when incomes decreased. Ecological construction and the value added by industries which used more farmers and off-farm workers were both correlated with morality. We also found a dark side to science and technological innovation, which harmed collective morality when areas grew richer. But all the results we found were correlational, more casual lab experiments were needed in future research.