Thinking About Right and Wrong: Examining the Effect of Moral Conflict on Entertainment Experiences, and Knowledge

ABSTRACT

Given that news stories feature many morally-laden topics, this study investigated the effect of moral conflict in news stories on entertainment experiences and learning outcomes. We propose that a reader’s perception of moral conflict in a non-fictional news story will lead to the cognitively engaging experience of appreciation, which is characterized as thought-provoking, moving, and meaningful. Moreover, we suggest that this experience will impact two aspects of knowledge gain: the acquisition of knowledge (objective knowledge) and the perception of having learned something (subjective knowledge). To investigate whether the perception of moral conflict and the experience of appreciation hampers or fosters knowledge gain, an online experiment was conducted in which participants (N= 334) read a feature story that was manipulated to induce the perception of moral conflict. Our results demonstrated that a news article perceived as morally conflicting led to more appreciation than one that was not perceived as morally conflicting. Our findings provide insight into the relationship between perceived moral conflict and learning outcomes, that is, knowledge acquisition and subjective knowledge, and the role of entertainment experiences in this relationship. Results are discussed in relation to the influence of entertainment experiences on learning.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Frederic R. Hopp and Julia R. Winkler for their useful insights and reading of the manuscript at various stages in its development, and Jaimie Adelson for providing language help. We are also grateful to Sabine Trepte, Robin Nabi, and various anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Some authors conceptualize eudaimonic and hedonic entertainment as two sub-processes of the overall concept media enjoyment (e.g., Tamborini et al., 2010). Following Bartsch and Schneider (2014), we use the term entertainment experiences to refer to the overall experience of entertainment gratifications obtained from media content which can manifest as enjoyment and appreciation.

2. Material is available at https://osf.io/ps6h7/?view_only=4b8389c3f5f44d2cbe967016716e2aa0.

3. Including these ten participants into the main analyses did not change the pattern of results.

4. Gender was assessed as a nominal variable with the categories “male”, “female”, and “none of the above” in order to avoid discriminating against participants who do not identify with the binary male/female options (<1%).

5. Across those groups, there was not a systematic distribution of gender, χ² (2) = 1.21, p= .547, age, t(330) = 0.42, p = .677, or education, Cramer’s V = .16, p= .320.

6. In addition to the measures listed below, we also assessed moral domain salience for care and fairness, using the moral foundations questionnaire (Graham, Haidt, & Nosek, 2009). However, as we neither found support for factorial validity nor for reliability of these scales, we excluded them from further analyses. Moreover, we also used self-report measures for systematic and heuristic processing (Schemer, Matthes, & Wirth, 2008). We included those in a previously tested model (cf., Knop-Huelss, Rieger, & Schneider 2017). Due to conceptual overlaps of the scales and reviewers’ suggestions, we decided to report the model that does not entail potential tautological assumptions.

7. We report unstandardized latent regression coefficients and effects. Confidence intervals for specific indirect and total indirect effects were estimated using Monte Carlo simulations (20,000 repetitions) as described by Preacher and Selig (2012).

8. We also ran a model with additional direct effects of the condition on enjoyment and appreciation. These additional paths were not significant and did not substantially alter the indirect effects via perceived moral conflict.