The Impact of Terrorist Attack News on Moral Intuitions

ABSTRACT

Previous research demonstrated that exposure to news of the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, France increased the salience of moral intuitions associated with respect for authority and purity in a sample of U.S. participants. The present study attempted to replicate this finding with news of domestic terrorism by examining the effect of exposure to news of the 2017 Las Vegas, Nevada music festival shooting. Approximately three weeks before the Las Vegas shooting occurred, participants (N = 195) drawn from a population similar to the original study completed a survey measuring their moral intuition salience. Four days after the event, participants (N = 162) read either news coverage of the shooting or a control story and once again completed a survey measuring their moral intuition salience. Our results replicated previous findings from research on the Paris terrorist attacks. Exposure to news of the Las Vegas terrorist attack increased the salience of respect for authority and purity. We discuss how our findings are in line with logic suggesting that news of a terrorist attacks can threaten audiences’ perceptions of societal safety, strengthen the need for societal cohesion, and increase the salience of binding moral intuitions.

KEYWORDS:

• Terrorism
• terrorist attack
• morality
• moral judgment
• news media
• model of intuitive morality and exemplars

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. We also asked participants to indicate how often they listened/watched/read news stories like the one they read for this study ranging from 1 (almost never) to 6 (several times a day). In order to determine whether previous exposure to news of the Vegas shooting may have affected our results, we added this news exposure variable as a covariate and re-ran all of our reported analyses. The inclusion of this variable did not affect our results to RQ1 or H1, and news exposure was not a significant predictor of wave 2 salience scores for any of the five intuitions (all F < 1).

2. In order to replicate the analyses by Tamborini et al. (2017), we also ran a series of ANOVAs excluding first wave MFQ scores as covariates. We first conducted a MANOVA, which revealed a statistically significant multivariate effect of exposure to news about the Vegas attack on moral intuition salience, Wilks’ Λ =.92 F (5, 202) = 3.39, p <.01, η_p² =.08. Follow up univariate ANOVAs again revealed no effect of news exposure on intuition salience of either care or fairness (the individualizing intuitions; both F < 1). However, unlike the findings of both Tamborini et al. (2017) and the present analyses accounting for wave 1 MFQ scores, we found no statistically significant effect of exposure to news of the Vegas attack on authority or purity salience scores (both F < 1) without the wave 1 score covariate. The univariate analysis did reveal an effect on ingroup loyalty, as loyalty MFQ scores in the control condition were higher at wave 2 (M = 3.78; SD =.88) than scores in the Vegas news condition (M = 3.44; SD =.87), F (1, 206) = 7.65, p <.01, η_p² =.04.

Because the findings associated with the authority and purity motivations were counter to our main MANCOVA findings, we conducted several follow-up analyses to probe the successfulness of our random assignment to conditions. Participants’ wave 1 MFQ scores did not differ between the control and Vegas news conditions for care or fairness (both F < 1). However, those assigned to the control condition indicated greater wave 1 loyalty salience (M = 4.06; SD =.83) and purity salience (M = 3.74; SD =.97) than those assigned to the Vegas news condition (loyalty: M = 3.76; SD =.84, F [1, 160] = 5.38, p =.02, η_p² =.03; purity: M = 3.36; SD =.88, F [1, 160] = 6.70, p =.01, η_p² =.04). Participants in the control condition also scored higher on authority salience at wave 1 (M = 4.04; SD =.80) compared to those in the Vegas news condition (M = 3.82; SD =.77), although these findings only approached statistical significance, F (1, 160) = 3.07, p =.08, η_p² =.02. These results seem to indicate that our findings are not robust to the exclusion of the covariate when there is an unequal distribution of trait intuition salience across conditions and underscore the importance of controlling for participants’ trait intuition salience (wave 1 scores) in order to avoid accepting a false null hypothesis (i.e., a Type 2 error).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ron Tamborini

Ron Tamborini (Ph.D., Indiana University) is a Professor in the Department of Communication at Michigan State University where he teaches courses in media processes and methods of communication inquiry. His research examines how characteristics of traditional and new media alter psychological experience and influence on users.

Lindsay Hahn

Lindsay Hahn (Ph.D., Michigan State University) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York. Her research investigates the cognitive processes surrounding media use and effects in audiences across the lifespan.

Melinda Aley

Melinda Aley, M.A., is a doctoral student in the Department of Communication at Michigan State University. Her research focuses on the ability of media content to act as a socializing agent for children. Her current projects include examining how moral messages in media content can influence the behaviors of children, media depictions of gender stereotypes, and media’s influence on young adults’ career choices.

Sujay Prabhu

Sujay Prabhu is a Research Associate in the Psychology of Entertainment Media Lab at Michigan State University. His interests include the role of intuitive motivations in the influence and evaluation of media, as well the development of implicit measures that can accurately gauge the accessibility of preconscious concepts.

Joshua Baldwin

Joshua Baldwin (M.S., Florida State University) is a PhD student in Communication at Michigan State University. His research focuses on positive media psychology and the emotional response to narrative media and entertainment.

Neha Sethi

Neha Sethi is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Communication at Michigan State University. Her research interests are media psychology, entertainment theory, narrative engagement, and new media technologies.

Eric Novotny

Eric Novotny is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Communication at Michigan State University and the current lab manager for the Center for Avatar Research and Immersive Social Media Applications (CARISMA). His primary area of interest is studying basic nonverbal and interpersonal communication processes with new media. Eric has integrated these interests with the VR and motion capture systems to examine coordinated movement’s capacity to reduce outgroup bias.

Brian Klebig

Brian Klebig is the Eleanor Wilson Chair of Communication Studies at Bethany Lutheran College, where his primary research area is an examination of the role of primal intuitions in shaping beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors. He is currently the director of the VOX Lab, a virtual and mixed reality research and production facility.

Matthias Hofer

Matthias Hofer (Ph.D., University of Zurich) is a Senior Research and Teaching Associate at the University of Zurich, Department of Communication and Media Research. Until 2020, he was a SNSF Ambizione Fellow. His main research areas include media effects through the lifespan, media audiences and effects, and entertainment research. He also examines the experience of presence in virtual environments.