Summary: New research finds that stories emphasizing particular moral traits help early adolescents adopt those values as part of their moral reasoning.
Source: University at Buffalo
Reading a story can be a meaningful part of a child’s moral education. A recent study shows that narrative media — books, comics and other character-driven stories — can shift how much importance young people place on specific moral values.
“Media can distinctly influence separate moral values and encourage children to prioritize some values over others, depending on which values are highlighted in the content,” says Lindsay Hahn, PhD, assistant professor of communication at the University at Buffalo College of Arts and Sciences.
Hahn led the study to examine a more nuanced question than many earlier inquiries into media effects: rather than classifying content simply as prosocial or antisocial, the research tested whether exposure to narratives that emphasize particular moral intuitions — care, fairness, loyalty and authority — affects the relative importance children place on those values.
The results, published in the Journal of Media Psychology, indicate that narratives emphasizing specific moral traits do appear to increase the salience of those traits for early adolescents. The research supports the idea that narrative-based influence can complement direct moral instruction from parents, teachers and caregivers.
“Parents, caregivers and educators often ask how media can be used constructively,” Hahn explains. “Understanding which moral values a story highlights and how characters are treated because of their moral choices gives adults another tool for selecting media that supports the kind of moral development they want to encourage.”
For the experiment, Hahn and colleagues adapted the main character from a young adult novel and produced multiple versions of the narrative. Each version emphasized one of four moral intuitions — care, fairness, loyalty or authority — and a fifth version portrayed an amoral protagonist. Researchers presented these edited narratives to about 200 participants aged 10 to 14, a range selected because it balances the cognitive demands of narrative comprehension with the attention span and developmental stage of early adolescents.
To measure impact, the team developed a scale designed specifically to assess how much importance children place on the different moral values. The scale allowed them to test whether a story emphasizing a given intuition led participants to rate that intuition as more central to their own moral judgments.
“Measuring these kinds of effects with children can be challenging, which is why creating a reliable, age-appropriate measure of moral values was an important part of this project,” Hahn says. She adds that the measure can be used in future studies to better understand how media shapes moral development in young audiences.
The study’s findings align with predictions from the model of intuitive morality and exemplars (MIME), which proposes that narrative media can make certain moral intuitions more salient for audiences by highlighting them through characters and plot. Prior tests of MIME have focused mainly on adults; this work extends the model’s application to early adolescents.
In addition to Hahn, co-authors on the paper include Ron Tamborini (Michigan State University), Sujay Prabhu (MSU affiliate), Clare Grall (Dartmouth College), Eric Novotny (University of Georgia) and Brian Klebig (Bethany Lutheran College).
About this neurodevelopment research news
Author: Bert Gambini
Source: University at Buffalo
Contact: Bert Gambini – University at Buffalo
Image: The image is in the public domain
Original Research: Closed access. “Narrative Media’s Emphasis on Distinct Moral Intuitions Alters Early Adolescents’ Judgements” by Lindsay Hahn et al., Journal of Media Psychology: Theories, Methods, and Applications.
Abstract
Narrative Media’s Emphasis on Distinct Moral Intuitions Alters Early Adolescents’ Judgements
The model of intuitive morality and exemplars (MIME) predicts that narrative media emphasizing particular moral intuitions will increase the salience of those intuitions among audience members. Until now, empirical support for MIME has been largely limited to adult samples.
Across two studies, this research tested MIME predictions with early adolescents (ages 10–14). In a pilot study using verbal prompts (N = 87) and a main study using a comic-book narrative (N = 107), the salience of care, fairness, loyalty and authority intuitions was manipulated and then measured after exposure.
Results showed that verbal prompts emphasizing care, fairness and loyalty in the pilot study increased the salience of those respective intuitions. In the main study, exposure to comic-book versions that each emphasized one of the four intuitions increased the salience of that intuition among early adolescent readers. Findings are discussed with respect to MIME and the broader implications for how narrative media influence children’s moral judgments.