Early Adolescents Can Extract Distinct Moral Lessons from Narrative Media Content

Abstract

ABSTRACT Extant research suggests that young audiences often misinterpret narratives’ moral messages, potentially limiting the ability of narratives to serve as effective purveyors of moral lessons. Yet questions remain regarding whether young audiences’ inability to extract moral messages from narratives is due to limitations in their moral comprehension, the types of values emphasized by the stimuli in previous studies, or variance from study to study in the measurement of what counts as an “accurate” extraction of a moral. The present study offers an approach for answering these questions by investigating early adolescents’ capacity for extracting narratives’ moral lessons according to a scheme of moral values outlined by the model of intuitive morality and exemplars (MIME). We content-analyzed open-ended responses from three previous studies that had N = 753 early adolescents (ages 9–14) identify the main point of a moral narrative designed to emphasize care, fairness, loyalty, authority, or a non-moral narrative that emphasized egoism. Results revealed that participants accurately extracted the main point across narratives that emphasized each distinct value, suggesting that moral comprehension may not be to blame for early adolescents’ inability to extract narratives’ moral lessons. Discussion focuses on the MIME’s utility for advancing understandings of young audiences’ moral narrative comprehension.