Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Microaggressions are unintentional or thoughtless behaviors that convey negative messages to members of minoritygroups. Due to the attributional ambiguity of microaggressions, people often differ in their judgments about how morally badacts of microaggression are. To account for this individual variation, we explored the potential influence of heavy social mediause on individuals’ moral judgments of microaggressive behaviors. We hypothesized that, because of the relative acceptance ofstrong blame expressions on social media, heavy Facebook users would endorse intense moral criticism of microaggressions.Participants read about several agents who committed microaggressions and judged the appropriateness of moral criticism(pretested to vary in degrees from “disapprove of,” “chastise,” “chew out,” to “lash out at”) that a friend directed towards theoffender. Consistent with our hypothesis, we found a strong correlation (r = .47) between increasing degrees of Facebook useand increasing acceptance of harsher moral criticism for microaggressions.