Priming Character Traits and Morality: How Cognitive Priming Affects Judgment of Emotional Moral Primes

Often in media we are immediately cued to the moral qualities of a character before any actions or dialogue have been given to portray such judgments. This can be explained through the use of Disposition Theory (Zillmann, 2000; Zillmann, 2006) and its theoretical extensions (see Raney, 2004). Judgments of the moral extremity of moral upholding and violation are likely dependent upon the attributes of ourselves that we view as positive or negative (Monin & Jordan, 2009) and also the traits we perceive as important within others (Abele & Wojciszke, 2007; Wojciszke, Bazinska, & Jaworski, 1998; Cottrell, Neuberg, & Li, 2007; Leach, Ellemers, & Barreto, 2007). But do judgments of a moral action rely on cognitive dispositions? If we are predisposed to be considering positive moral character traits, would a moral violation cause perception of that action as being more severe than if they were predisposed to be considering negative moral character traits? The current thesis reports the results of a study designed to answer this question. Using a sentence unscrambling task to initially prime subjects with a positive, negative, or control moral character trait dispositions, subjects are then presented with moral violations or upholding of care-, fairness-, loyalty-, and authority-relevant actions, and tasked with rating the level of (dis)approbation that each action should carry. Results indicate very little, if any, priming effect of the sentence unscrambling task on the moral judgments. Future research would do well to follow-up on this research however, as this particular study had a relatively low N and could result in significance in future endeavors.

Grantor dc:publisher

State University of New York at Buffalo

Year dc:date.issued

2018

Author dc:creator

• Walton, Jess

Contributors dc:contributor

• Grizzard, Matthew
• Communication

• communication

Statement dc:rights

• Users of works found in University at Buffalo Institutional Repository (UBIR) are responsible for identifying and contacting the copyright owner for permission to reuse. University at Buffalo Libraries do not manage rights for copyright-protected works and cannot assist with permissions.
• Copyright retained by author.

Language dc:language

eng

Handle dc:identifier

http://hdl.handle.net/10477/78109

OAI record oai:identifier

https://ubir.buffalo.edu/oai/request?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=qdc&identifier=oai%3Aubir.buffalo.edu%3A10477%2F78109