fjswayze/mern

Am I the Moral One?

Am I the Moral One is a web application that asks users a series of ethical dilemmas and records their answers. After they finish the survey, they can see how their answers compare to other users, and look at answer choice patterns across demographic groups (e.g.: gender, religious affiliation, political affiliation, etc.).

Live Demo

Technologies Used

Am I the Moral One's backend uses MongoDB, Node.js and Express; it's frontend uses React.js. To implement the data visualization, we used the Recharts API.

Quizzes

In our database, we stored demographic data with each question answer. The benefit was that this data was easily retrievable. However, this also meant that we needed to be creative when it came to creating our quiz form functionality. Our quiz form stored an object (named functions) representing the user's answers. We updated that object each time the user selected an answer button:

handleClickA(){
       this.props.functions[this.props.question._id -1] = 'choiceA'; 
       if(this.state.KlassA === 'quiz-question-a'){
           this.setState({KlassA: "select-a", KlassB: 'quiz-question-b'})} else {
               this.setState({KlassA: 'quiz-question-a'})
           }

When the user clicks the submit button, we send their answers and demographic info to our backend:

 handleClick(){
  
      let user = this.props.user; 
      this.props.functions.map((choice, idx) => {
          this.props.updateQuizQuestion((idx + 1), 1, choice, user.age, user.education, user.politicalLeaning, user.religiousAffilation, user.gender, user.ethnicity, user.petChoice, user.location)
      })
      this.props.history.push('/results')
         
  }

This then updates our database:

router.patch("/update/:id", (req, res) => {
   filter =  { _id: req.params.id , quizNum: req.body.quizNum };
   update =  {  $inc: {
     [`question.questionChoices.${req.body.choice}.demo.age.${req.body.age}`]: 1,
    [`question.questionChoices.${req.body.choice}.demo.education.${req.body.education}`]: 1,
    [`question.questionChoices.${req.body.choice}.demo.politicalLeaning.${req.body.politicalLeaning}`]: 1,
    [`question.questionChoices.${req.body.choice}.demo.religiousAffilation.${req.body.religiousAffilation}`]: 1,
    [`question.questionChoices.${req.body.choice}.demo.gender.${req.body.gender}`]: 1,
    [`question.questionChoices.${req.body.choice}.demo.petChoice.${req.body.petChoice}`]: 1,
    [`question.questionChoices.${req.body.choice}.demo.ethnicity.${req.body.ethnicity}`]: 1,
    [`question.questionChoices.${req.body.choice}.demo.location.${req.body.location}`]: 1,
   }
    };

   Quiz.findOneAndUpdate( filter, update, function(
   err,
   result
 ) {
   if (err) {
     res.send(err);
   } else {
     res.send(result);
   }
 });
});

Data Visualization

We used the Recharts API to visualize the demographic data for our quizzes, i.e. what answers people of different political ideologies gave on a given moral dilemma. Here's what it looks like on our website:

These graphs draw on data from our Redux state. Below are two pictures displaying a sample Redux state:

Here's what the pie chart looks like under the hood:

    <div className="demo-label-bolded">{labels[0]}</div>
       <div className="sample-size-label">
              {demoGroup1A === undefined ? "" : `sample size: ${demoGroup1A + demoGroup1B}`}</div>
       </div>`

         
             <PieChart width={200} height={200}>
                 <Pie 
                     data={data}
                     cx={100}
                     cy={100}
                     labelLine={false}
                     label={renderCustomizedLabel}
                     outerRadius={80}
                     fill="#8884d8"
                     dataKey="value"
                 >
                     {
                         data.map((entry, index) => <Cell key={`cell-${index}`} fill={COLORS[index % COLORS.length]} />)
                     }
                 </Pie>
             </PieChart>

Quiz Creation

Users can create their own quizzes, which then appear on the quiz index page of our site.

User Info

Based on their answers to the first quiz, we judge whether a user's moral views align more with Consequentialist or Kantian ethics. We keep track of the user's answers to the first quiz and use their answer choices to calculate which ethical camp they fall into. This information is displayed on the user info page.