Television stories and social reality: Moral effects and the role of emotional processes
Final Report Abstract
In the course of this project, six studies were conducted, illuminating the influence of moral messages in fictional television and films on the values, beliefs and behaviors of the audience. Possible pathways by which these moral messages unfold their potential were investigated in a multitude of ways: In separate studies, effects of exposure on moral reasoning, idealistic moral expectations, moral sensitivity, moral cognition, and behavioral intentions were analyzed. Effects on moral chronicity and frequency estimates of norm violations (first order cultivation) were also explored, but inconclusive results indicated the need for different approaches and more follow-up. One result consistent across all studies is the importance of state narrative engagement and trait narrative engageability for morality-related outcomes. Narrative engageability increased moral sensitivity to a morally intense stimulus, indicating that television's moral messages only become accessible (i.e. can be recognized and verbalized) to viewers, if these viewers have a propensity to engage with narratives (study 1). Narrative engageability also emerged as a significant predictor when turning the focus to genre-specific moral sensitivity, corroborating the stable relationship between these two constructs (study 1, second experiment). Narrative engageability also showed a positive relationship with moral reasoning schemas (study 2). The trait was negatively related to less complex reasoning schemas (personal interest, and maintaining norms) and positively related to post-conventional reasoning, which is considered to be the most sophisticated schema. These results indicate that audiences' propensity to engage with narratives is related to greater salience of more abstract, complex moral reasoning, allowing for considerations of comprehensive ethical standpoints outside of a rigid legalistic rulebook. This notion is in line with the finding that taking an unusual perspective (that of a perpetrator) leads to the activation of moral schemas (study 4 and 5), suggesting that television series, especially morally complex or ambiguous content, foster moral considerations. Narrative engageability emerged again as a significant influence for idealistic moral expectations (study 3), with the propensity to being engaged being related to stronger genre-congruent ideas on how the world at large functions and how people should behave. Apart from such cognitive moral outcomes, we also found that narrative engagement influences behavioral intentions by raising the moral emotion of guilt and, in turn, moral norms (study 6). We found evidence that narrative engageability may be a crucial motivator for viewers to actually watch television stories (study 3), which then initiates a cultivation process under the right circumstances. Surprisingly, genre exposure proved to be less of an influence on people's moral conceptions than hypothesized. In some of our studies, exposure to fictional television showed the expected relationship, yet mostly, the effect was absent. One possible reason is that contemporary series produced for television or streaming services tend to obfuscate clear genre patterns, favoring a mixture of characteristics, which draw from different traditional patterns and contain complex moral messages. Thus, genre may be losing its power as an indicator for exposure to homogenous content.
Publications
- (2014) Immersion. In: Wünsch, C., Schramm, H., Gehrau, V. & Bilandzic, H. (Hrsg.). Handbuch Rezeptions- und Wirkungsforschung (S. 273-290). Band I: Medienrezeption. Baden-Baden: Nomos
Bilandzic, H.
- (2016). Narratives Erleben und Transportation. In: N. C. Krämer, S. Schwan, D. Unz, M. Suckfüll (Hrsg.). Medienpsychologie. Schlüsselbegriffe und Konzepte. 2., überarbeitete und erweiterte Auflage (243 - 252). Stuttgart: Verlag W. Kohlhammer
Sukalla, F. & Bilandzic, H.
- (2016). Surprise! An Investigation of Orienting Responses to Test Assumptions of Narrative Processing. Communication Research, 43(6), 844-862
Sukalla, F., Shoenberger, H., & Bolls, P. D.
(See online at https://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0093650215596363) - (2017). Narrative Persuasion und Einstellungsdissonanz. Ein konservativer Test der zentralen Wirkungszusammenhänge. Wiesbaden: Springer VS
Sukalla, F.
(See online at https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-20445-7) - (2017). Television stories and the cultivation of moral reasoning: the role of genre exposure and narrative engageability. Journal of Media Ethics, 32(4), 202-220
Schnell, C., & Bilandzic, H. K.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1080/23736992.2017.1371022) - (2017). The Narrative Within the Narrative: The Effectiveness of Narrative HIV Prevention Ads Depends on Their Placement Within a Context Narrative. International Journal of Communication, 11, 5048-5067
Kalch, A., & Bilandzic, H.
- (2017): Beyond metaphors and traditions: Exploring the boundaries of narrative engagement. In F. Hakemulder, E. Tan, M. Kuijpers and K. Balint (Hrsg.). Handbook of Narrative Absorption (S. 11 - 27). Amsterdam, Niederlande: John Benjamins
Bilandzic, H. & Busselle, R.
- 18. Morality in Entertainment". Communication and Media Ethics, edited by Patrick Lee Plaisance, Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2018, pp. 329-346
Bilandzic, H.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110466034-018)
