Collective Moral Motivation in the Shadow of War: Cues from Large‐scale Newspaper Corpus in Chinese Modern History

ABSTRACT Will continuous wars change social morality? While previous research focused on war ethics, in this study, by tracking large‐scale historical newspapers, from the perspective of digital humanities, we provide evidence through big data analysis to answer this question. Leveraging the database the Late Qing and Republican‐Era Chinese Newspaper and widely‐used psychological moral lexicons, we retrace the diurnal dynamics of collective moral motivation in Chinese modern history from 1919/1/1 to 1949/9/30. Analyzing historical newspapers with moral lexicons, we track moral motivation across four wartime periods: Warlord Era, Agrarian War, Anti‐Japanese War, and Liberation War. Statistics shown that moral motivation of Chinese society continuously increased as the wars dragged on. It is also discovered that the wars significantly motivated a higher level of agency motive than communion motive. As far as we know, this is the first empirical study from a digital humanities perspective that discusses the relationship between war and collective morality.