Probing Narrative Morals: A New Character-Focused MFT Framework for Use with Large Language Models

Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) provides a framework for categorizing different forms of moral reasoning, but its application to computational narrative analysis remains limited. We propose a novel character-centric method to quantify moral foundations in storytelling, using large language models (LLMs) and a novel Moral Foundations Character Action Questionnaire (MFCAQ) to evaluate the moral foundations supported by the behaviour of characters in stories. We validate our approach against human annotations and then apply it to a study of 2,697 folktales from 55 countries. Our findings reveal: (1) broad distribution of moral foundations across cultures, (2) significant crosscultural consistency with some key regional differences, and (3) a more balanced distribution of positive and negative moral content than suggested by prior work. This work connects MFT and computational narrative analysis, demonstrating LLMs' potential for scalable moral reasoning in narratives. 1