Abstract
Previous research has supported that personality traits can act to a precursor to media preferences. Due to the ongoing association between morality and media preferences in public and political discourse (e.g., blaming immoral behaviours on media preferences), this research sought to expand the knowledge about factors that contribute to media preferences by investigating if moral reasoning styles explain some of the variance that was not already explained by personality traits. A specific form of media preferences were chosen – lyrical preferences in metal music – as claims between metal lyrical themes and behaviour have been ongoing since the 1980s, despite a lack of empirical evidence to support these claims. A lyrical preferences scale was developed, and utilizing this scale, it was found that different types of metal fans exhibit different moral reasoning styles dependent on their metal sub-genre identification. Further, it was found that moral reasoning styles explain a portion of the variance in lyrical preferences that weren’t already explained by personality traits. In particular, lyrical preferences were often thematically consistent with moral reasoning content and personality traits, such as that individuals that preferred lyrics about celebrating metal culture and unity had higher levels of the group loyalty moral reasoning domain alongside being higher in extraversion. The implications of moral reasoning styles and personality traits as being precursors to media preferences are discussed.
Highlights
There is an ongoing debate in popular culture about the relationship between various forms of violent media, negative behaviour, and immorality
This study examined the association between lyrical preferences, moral reasoning domains, and personality traits
We first developed a lyrical preferences scale that allowed for comparisons between members of the metal music community
Summary
There is an ongoing debate in popular culture about the relationship between various forms of violent media, negative behaviour, and immorality. This article focuses on the example of music, from which generalities are often made between socially taboo lyrics (e.g., content that includes sexuality, violence, drugs, suicide, etc.) and actual behaviour. The associations between lyrics and immoral behaviour often don’t hold up under scrutiny, and studies rarely account for lyrical preferences and their precursors. There is evidence of many precursors to media preferences, including emotional vulnerability/content relatability [1], personality factors [2, 3] and an individual’s pre-existing ideology [4]. This study builds on previous studies of media preferences by using a pre-established precursor–personality traits– as a basis to look at an additional potential precursor: moral reasoning styles.
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