Moral Conflict, Screen Stories, and Narrative Appeal

Abstract

Abstract Moral conflict, in other words the violation of one or more moral norms in order to uphold different moral norms, undergirds all appealing narrative fictions. The Model of Intuitive Morality and Exemplars (MIME), which is rooted in moral foundations theory, provides a method of evaluating moral conflict as expressed in screen stories. While viewing moral conflict, viewers have to engage in rational cognitive processes in order to evaluate the witnessed behavior; this can be an important catalyzer for moral understanding. The chapter introduces a Moral Foundations Dictionary to extract the moral conflict in a given story in relation to (1) within-foundation versus between-foundations conflict, (2) magnitude of conflict, and (3) degree of polarity. A proposed Moral Narrative Analyzer will be able to extract moral information and conflict from narratives. A more recent framework for evaluating the moral content of stories is rooted in Morality as Cooperation.