Jaehong Kim

Jaehong Kim

Moral Psychology · AI/NLP

I am a Ph.D. candidate at KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology), advised by sociologist Wonjae Lee. I completed two research internships at the Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy, supervised by computational social scientist Meeyoung Cha, with whom I continue to collaborate. My research is supported by the Hyundai Motor Chung Mong-Koo Foundation.

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Research

My research examines how moral emotion shapes behavior in the attention economy — how platforms amplify morally charged content, and how exposure to it changes what people do online and offline.

Measurement. I build computational frameworks for detecting moral emotions from text and video, using transformer-based models and multimodal architectures. Applying these methods reveals a consistent pattern: moral outrage — expressions that blame and condemn others — most strongly predicts committed user participation, outpacing other moral and emotional appeals. I am also developing explainable AI techniques to make these models interpretable.

Behavioral Effects. I trace the downstream reach of this finding. Does the outrage effect extend to offline political behavior? Does it hold when manufactured by malicious actors? And do LLMs that deploy moral outrage become more politically persuasive?

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Ongoing Work

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