Media and Morality

While research focused largely on the negative consequences of television and its possible role in moral decay, little research has focused on its potential to teach, strengthen, and uphold prosocial behaviour. Therefore, the present project focuses on the positive prosocial consequences of media, and how prosocial sensibility follows from viewer's moral reasoning of different types of media text. This project has two major goals: (1) to understand the complex ways in which moral reasoning works, and (2) to examine whether prosocial behaviours in several forms of media are able to affect pro-social behaviour in children, adolescents, and adults. In order to address these goals, an interdisciplinary multi-method approach is used, relying on qualitative as well as quantitative methodologies.