Template matching and moral judgment: A new method and empirical test

•Tools from the sociology of culture can help settle interdisciplinary debates about categorization.•Moral vignettes can be translated into simpler connotative structures without much loss of information.•Connotative meanings of moral vignettes help us reach a rigorous definition of a prototypical moral wrong.•Distance from the prototypical moral transgression is informative of the time it takes to classify events as immoral.•Distance from prototypical moral transgression is predictive of the moral language that occurs around events in naturally occurring text. The sociology of culture provides tools to weigh in on key interdisciplinary debates that hinge around categorization and its underlying processes. For example, at present, there is widespread debate about how individuals come to perceive events as immoral. In this paper, I use sociological approaches to cultural meaning to test one of the leading theories of moral cognition: the idea that individuals attribute immorality through template matching. I use spatial measures of cultural meaning to define and locate a prototypical moral wrong. I then test the theory of template matching and find evidence that distance from the typical moral transgression -in semantic space - is related to the time it takes to categorize an event as immoral or harmful. I then test these results on a corpus of naturally occurring text to assess their external validity. These studies provide empirical evidence supporting the notion that the attribution of immorality occurs through template matching. Furthermore, they also serve to illustrate that productive conversations can emerge when we take the insights that sociologists of culture and cognition have reached in the past few decades out of our disciplinary boundaries.