Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The Model of Intuitive Morality and Exemplars (MIME)predicts a mutual dependency between the moral scrutiny ofmediated narratives and media exposure. This study proposesmoral judgments of media content are not only related to basalmoral domain salience and exemplars, but also to the immediateprocessing state of the individual at the moment of exposure. Anexperiment manipulating construal level prior to exposure to amediated narrative was conducted to test this proposal. The resultssuggest that evaluations of moral violations are modulated byconstrual level. High-level construal led to harsher, moreconsistent judgments of domain-violator morality, eliminating theeffect of baseline moral intuitions. Low-level construal induced anapparent trade-off in moral evaluation strategy which is sensitive toboth narrative outcome and domain salience. When domainviolators were punished, intuitive moral salience was negativelycorrelated with moral evaluations; however, when domainviolators were rewarded, the opposite trend emerged. Thesefindings indicate the need for an adjustment to the MIME model toallow for processing states to interact with moral domain salienceand moral judgments of media content. They also suggest that thestrength and quality of moral intuitions are not robust to broadercognitive processes, but interact with them.