Moral Narratives Workshop Proceedings

The Moral Narratives Workshop (www. moralnarratives.org) was organized in 2022 to kickstart and develop an interdisciplinary, empirical study of stories told about people’s moral actions and characters. Across eight weeks, the workshop featured talks on topics such as the cognitive mechanisms of moral narrative construction (e.g., narrator’s goals, pragmatic inferences, the role of audiences, deception), the various functions of moral narratives (e.g., cultural/master narratives, narrative identity, understanding, legitimization and maintenance of power, persuasion, autobiographical memory, victimizing, redemption, moral development), featuring cases of moral narratives in various contexts (e.g., criminal justice, propaganda, politics, journalism, literature, science communication). Each talk was followed by an hour-long group discussion expanding on the themes of the talks. Participants came from diverse backgrounds, including psychology, philosophy, linguistics, communications, journalism, literature, political science, and anthropology. Here, we provide a record of the insights arising from the group discussions. Its contents faithfully reflect the diversity, complexity and messiness of human knowledge production. We intend for these workshop proceedings to serve as a rich and generative resource for future scholarship on moral narratives.