A study recently published in the Psychological Science revealed that when people repeatedly see headlines about corporate misconduct, they view the wrongdoing as bad behavior and are more likely to believe that the headlines are true.
Social media can cause scandalous news to go viral in an instant, and the re-sharing of sensational headlines ensures that people come across these scandals again and again. To test the effects of this repetition on moral judgment, researchers at the Vanderbilt Peabody College of education and human development and the London Business School sent text messages to study participants with news headlines about corporate misconduct. The study took place over the course of 15 days while the participants went about their daily routine.
“We often think of social media and the current digital media landscape as increasing our anger and moral outrage, but in this case, repeated exposure to corporate wrongdoing actually made people less angry about moral transgression,” said Lisa Fazio, associate professor of psychology and human development.
“When we repeatedly see the news of the latest viral wrongdoing on social media, we often encounter it passively, at random times of the day, and while we may be distracted by other tasks. In our research, we have shown that even passing encounters can shape our thoughts and emotional reactions,” said Raunak Pillai, the first author of the study and a psychology doctoral student at the Knowledge Lab in the Fazio Building.
The researchers found that participants rated repeated wrongdoing headlines as less ethical than new headlines—a phenomenon known as the moral repetition effect—and that participants’ anger dissipated when they encountered the wrongdoing depicted in repeated headlines versus new headlines. The less anger they feel, the worse behavior they judge the wrongdoing. Likewise, the wrongdoings of the repeated subjects verses the new subjects were marked as less unusual, which also led to the judgment of the wrongdoing as less ethical.
As such, the effect of repetition size on moral judgment decreased as participants encountered more subjects; in other words, the effects were greater from the first to the second encounter compared to the 15th to 16th encounter. As repetitions increase, the effect on moral judgment becomes progressively smaller.
In addition, the more often participants looked at a headline, the more real they thought it was (known as the illusory reality effect). After the initial viewings of the headlines, the participants’ truth ratings rose sharply and then peaked, suggesting that the first few encounters with a headline have the most impact on people’s beliefs. The findings also suggest that perceptions of unethical behavior as real may elicit a more sympathetic moral judgment, but the authors say more research is needed to confirm this effect.
“The more we hear about a wrongdoing, the more we believe it—but the less we care,” the authors wrote.
More information:
Raunak M. Pillai et al, Repeatedly Encountered Descriptions of Mistakes Seem More Real but Less Unethical: Evidence from a Naturalistic Situation, Psychological Science (2023). DOI: 10.1177/09567976231180578
Provided by Vanderbilt University
Citation: Repeated viewing of wrongdoing headlines reduces perception of moral offense, study finds (2023, July 25) retrieved 25 July 2023 from https://phys.org/news/2023-07-headlines-wrongdoing-perception-moral-offense.html
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