Given the increasing realism of social interactions online, social media offers an unprecedented avenue to evaluate real-life moral scenarios. We examine posts from Reddit, where authors and commenters share their moral judgments on who is blameworthy. We employ computational techniques to investigate factors influencing moral judgments, including (1) events activating social commonsense and (2) linguistic signals. To this end, we focus on excerpt-which we term moral sparks-from original posts that commenters include to indicate what motivates their moral judgments. By examining over 24,672 posts and 175,988 comments, we find that event-related negative personal traits (e.g., immature and rude) attract attention and stimulate blame, implying a dependent relationship between moral sparks and blameworthiness. Moreover, language that impacts commenters' cognitive processes to depict events and characters enhances the probability of an excerpt become a moral spark, while factual and concrete descriptions tend to inhibit this effect.

翻译：鉴于线上社交互动日益增强的真实性，社交媒体为评估现实生活中的道德情景提供了前所未有的途径。我们分析了Reddit上的帖子，其中发帖者和评论者分享他们对谁应受指责的道德判断。采用计算方法，我们调查了影响道德判断的因素，包括(1)激活社会常识的事件和(2)语言信号。为此，我们聚焦于原始帖子中评论者引用以表明其道德动机的片段——我们称之为“道德火花”。通过考察超过24,672篇帖子和175,988条评论，我们发现与事件相关的负面个人特质（如不成熟、粗鲁）会吸引注意力并激发指责，这表明道德火花与应受指责性之间存在依赖关系。此外，影响评论者认知过程以描绘事件和人物的语言会增强片段成为道德火花的概率，而事实性和具体性描述则倾向于抑制这一效应。