UC Santa Barbara

The Model of Intuitive Morality and Exemplars details the short- and long-term processes driving media selection, assessment, and production cycles (Tamborini, 2011), however, it does not account for linkages that have been found between biological sex, hormonal stress response, moral judgment, and media preference. The role of sex, stress, hormones, and potential interaction effects on moral media content evaluation were therefore assessed in addition to foundational MIME predictions. It was hypothesized that moral intuitions, sex-specific stress response, and hormonal markers would predict shifts in the salience and perception of care and loyalty. In this study, participants were tracked over two weeks during the highly stressful initial unfolding of the global Coronavirus pandemic. Moral intuitions, psychographics, and demographics were measured, as well as self-reported stress and a battery of life situation and belief variables later used to develop a theoretical stress prediction model. An experimental induction took place halfway through the study, whereby participants were randomly assigned to either a high stress or low stress Coronavirus news prime, and then asked to evaluate two of eight possible stories varying in story condition (care vs. loyalty upheld) and moral conflict (conflict vs. no conflict). Repeated measures analyses were conducted using a Linear Mixed Models Approach. Results failed to replicate well-documented MIME patterns, although various significant interactions between story type, sex, stress, news prime condition, and menstrual phase on both story enjoyment/appreciation and measures of character morality were uncovered. Further, sex differences in sensitivity to different moral foundations, as well as relationships between perceptions of virus threat, notions of purity, xenophobia, and ethnocentrism were found. Possible explanations of unexpected findings are offered. Implications and future directions regarding research and data analysis are discussed.