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Punishing Media Criminals and Moral Judgment: The Impact on Enjoyment

In this study, I investigated the relation between moral judgment and the enjoyment of crime dramas by varying the relative severity of punishment levied for a crime. One hundred fifty-one participants rated their enjoyment of a video clip depicting a crime with the perpetrator being punished either excessively or not at all. In keeping with previous literature, I predicted that the different punishments would elicit different levels of moral judgment, which would then impact enjoyment. The results indicate that crime drama enjoyment was consistently predicted by certain social justice attitudes and resulting moral judgments about the content. The findings lend support to moral sanction theory and the integrated model of crime drama enjoyment and shed further insight into how viewer cognitions impact dispositional affiliations formed toward characters in media entertainment.