**[Connect with me on Linkedin](https://www.linkedin.com/in/mariekevanvlietvandergraaff)** ### Notes and conclusions of conference ### My talk ![[How to measure gut feelings on the street.png]] ### Shaping technology with society's voice: measuring gut feelings and values The intimate technological revolution is changing how we connect with technology on a deeply personal level. It’s no longer just around us, it’s within us, between us, and learning from us in ways we’ve never experienced before. As these technologies become deeply intertwined with our daily experiences, they transform our identities and values, not just our behaviours. This intimate integration raises urgent questions about how we can understand and shape the values that should guide our technological future. Research has consistently shown that the topics we choose to speak about reflect what occupies our minds and what we consider important, revealing our unique perspectives and underlying identity (Pennebaker, 2003, 2011). How can we use this idea to uncover the gut feelings and values of society to align the development of emerging technology with what truly matters to society? Our work explores this question through an innovative method: the [[Moral Data City Hunt]] (van Veen, 2022, Wernaart, 2021). In this interactive moral lab, citizens are confronted with scenarios about technologies that they actively shape through moral choices. "How do we balance the benefits and drawbacks of emerging technologies that promise progress but disrupt current ways of life, such as delivery drones offering convenience while raising privacy concerns or lab-grown meat making food production more sustainable while raising questions about the artificial nature of food?" Through dynamic interviews that explore participants' reasoning, we create a rich context for exploring values about their future with this technology. Our methodology is grounded in Schwartz's Value Theory, which has emerged as the most influential framework for understanding personal values and their interrelationships (Schwartz, 2012). Research has shown that the words people use in natural conversation reflect their underlying values more accurately than self-reporting methods (Boyd et al., 2015). By analyzing participants' language through the Personal Value Dictionary (Ponizovskiy et al., 2020) - a validated tool linking words to Schwartz's value framework - we can capture the subtle ways values emerge in discussions about technological futures. This approach allows us to identify not just explicit moral statements, but also the implicit value patterns that emerge when people envision and discuss their desired relationship with technology. This work aims to explore which interview techniques best facilitate linguistic analysis of values. The key question we address is: how can we structure a five-minute conversation to elicit the rich linguistic patterns for automated value analysis through tools like the Personal Value Dictionary? Answering this question unlocks a powerful middle ground between traditional research approaches: capturing authentic societal gut feelings that surveys and focus groups often miss, while avoiding the contextual limitations of mining online linguistic data. This combination of real-world engagement and linguistic analysis provides a uniquely nuanced window into what truly drives society's relationship with technology. Wernaart, B. (2021). Developing a roadmap for the moral programming of smart technology. _Technology in Society_, _64_, 101466. [https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techsoc.2020.101466](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techsoc.2020.101466) Pennebaker, J. W., Mehl, M. R., & Niederhoffer, K. G. (2003). Psychological Aspects of Natural Language Use: Our Words, Our Selves. _Annual Review of Psychology_, _54_(Volume 54, 2003), 547-577. [https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.psych.54.101601.145041](https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.psych.54.101601.145041) Pennebaker, J. W. (2011). The secret life of pronouns. _New Scientist_, _211_(2828), 42-45. [https://doi.org/10.1016/S0262-4079(11)62167-2](https://doi.org/10.1016/S0262-4079\(11\)62167-2) van Veen, M., & Wernaart, B. (2022). _Building a techno-moral city – Reconciling public values, the ethical city committee and citizens’ moral gut feeling in techno-moral decision making by local governments_. Ponizovskiy, V., Ardag, M., Grigoryan, L., Boyd, R., Dobewall, H., & Holtz, P. (2020). Development and Validation of the Personal Values Dictionary: A Theory–Driven Tool for Investigating References to Basic Human Values in Text. _European Journal of Personality_, _34_(5), 885-902. [https://doi.org/10.1002/per.2294](https://doi.org/10.1002/per.2294) Boyd, R., Wilson, S., Pennebaker, J., Kosinski, M., Stillwell, D., & Mihalcea, R. (2015). Values in Words: Using Language to Evaluate and Understand Personal Values. _Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media_, _9_(1), 31-40. [https://doi.org/10.1609/icwsm.v9i1.14589](https://doi.org/10.1609/icwsm.v9i1.14589) Schwartz, S. H. (2012). An Overview of the Schwartz Theory of Basic Values. _Online Readings in Psychology and Culture_, _2_(1). [https://doi.org/10.9707/2307-0919.1116](https://doi.org/10.9707/2307-0919.1116)