Moral Disengagement Cues and Consequences for Victims in Entertainment Narratives: An Experimental Investigation

ABSTRACT The role of moral disengagement in evaluating narrative character behaviors has been a source of scholarly investigation for some time. Despite a theoretical interest in the process, little work has experimentally manipulated content features related to the mechanisms proposed by Bandura in his selective moral disengagement model. This paper presents the results of an experiment that manipulates the presence/absence of a victim of an immoral protagonist’s actions in an audio-visual narrative. We measure various narrative engagement variables including perspective-taking, approbation of behavior, and character liking. Thus, our study design tests content cues corresponding to Bandura’s selective moral disengagement hypotheses and links them to variables specified in Zillmann’s affective disposition theory. Findings indicate that perspective-taking with the immoral protagonist is enhanced when the victim is absent. Perspective-taking then has downstream effects on other narrative processing variables, such as character judgments, desires for specific story outcomes, and punitiveness toward similar real-world behaviors. The design of the current study thus provides a roadmap for future research, and we discuss the value of carefully manipulating narrative cues in order to encourage or discourage moral disengagement in viewers.