Moral Intuition and Media Entertainment
Abstract
This paper applies the social intuitionist perspective of moral foundations theory (MFT) to the study of media entertainment. It begins by introducing the MFT’s conception of morality as an intuitive evaluative response governed by the association of moral codes organized in five mental modules. These include harm/care (concerned with suffering and empathy); fairness (related to reciprocity and justice); loyalty (dealing with common good and punitiveness toward outsiders); authority (negotiating dominance hierarchies); and purity (concerned with sanctity and contamination).
After discussing initial tests examining MFT’s application to narrative appeal, and its potential broad application to entertainment theory, a model of intuitive morality and exemplars (MIME) is presented. The model describes long-term and short-term processes of reciprocal influence between media and moral intuition. In the long-term, the model predicts that repeated exposure to module-related content will lead to an individual and culturally-shared increase in the salience of specific modules and module exemplars. In the short-term, resulting patterns of module salience will affect the immediate appraisal of media content or, if content presents ambiguous or complex moral patterns, a delayed response though careful reappraisal. Patterns of positive or negative evaluative responses resulting from these appraisal processes are expected to shape individual and aggregate patterns of selective exposure to media, as well as the subsequent production of content within media systems driven by these exposure patterns. The paper concludes with an example of the model’s utility by showing how its short-term components can be applied to address conceptual difficulties in distinguishing enjoyment from appreciation.
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