Does What You Read Influence Your Morals?
Picture this.
Two men are hiking on a snowy mountain. Hiking is a kind word to use; it’s mainly rock climbing with hooks and grapples and immense exertion. It’s approaching night. They’re in a hurry to set up camp as wind picks up and snow obscures their field of vision. One of them falls and injures his thigh. The gash is deep. He can’t walk. They can’t stop the bleeding.
Does the uninjured man try to carry his friend down rocky slopes, risking both of their lives, or does he kill his friend, put him out of his misery, and find a way home?
Believe it or not, your answer to this question depends on what you like to read.
Alright, maybe that situation was a little extreme, but you get the idea.
Reading influences your morals. To get a better understanding of this phenomenon, you have to look at the Big Five personality traits, transportation, and confirmation bias.
The Big Five personality traits serve as the foundation for the concept that reading influences your morals. Personality is steady. It is stable over the course of a lifetime. If you rank high on extraversion, you are likely to rank high on extraversion for the rest of your life.
McCrae and Costa came up with five personality traits: openness to experience, extraversion, conscientiousness, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Where you score on these five traits plays a large role in how transportive reading is for you. The measure of transportation into a story determines how likely that story is to alter your morals.
High rankings on openness, extraversion, and agreeableness are associated with higher emphatic abilities. Higher emphatic abilities indicate a greater capacity to imagine other situations, such as the ones that occur in a narrative, which means there is a higher propensity for transportation present. Those who were further transported into a story were influenced more than someone who wasn’t as invested.
Transportation means that all of your mental faculties are focused on the story. You’re there. You’re in it. You can smell the baking macarons from Heartless by Marissa Meyer, feel the sticky air from Catching Fire by Suzzanne Collins, feel the love and devastation in It Ends with Us by Colleen Hoover, and taste the metal vials from Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson. You’re enamored and enraptured. It is a focus on what could be, rather than what is.
How does this translate into specific genres?
Let’s start with science fiction.
If you are constantly reading science fiction books such as Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir or Skyward by Brandon Sanderson, you are exposed to advanced technology and situations that are morally ambiguous. Does a talking spaceship have the same rights as humans? How do you interact with intelligent individuals from other species? If you’re fully transported into this world, you begin to engage with these discussions on a deep level. As a result, more things become morally permissible to you.
Interestingly, your belief that technology will advance faster than it realistically would will also increase. I don’t think any of us can be blamed. It would be awesome to have a lightsaber. Like, c’mon.
Fantasy is similar in this sense. We are dealing with elves and dwarves and extreme circumstances in which our traditional morals are made to be flexible. If you were reading a romance book, you would never approve of sending the protagonist sending their partner into the den of an incredibly dangerous person to retrieve an engagement ring. What an abhorrent idea! But that happens in a particular fantasy series that I love, and it’s a moment of power, of proving herself, and of healing.
If you choose to read romance or mystery, your morals aren’t stretched in the same way. Things in those books are relatively black and white. They’re familiar to what we see in the real world. It is easier to import our own morals and values without having to suspend our beliefs. A greater, rigid adherence to standard morals is used in these types of stories that doesn’t require the reader to bend as much. For example, the cop is going after the bad guy who killed someone. Killing someone is bad. The cop is good for fighting to find the bad guy against all odds.
While exposure to romance doesn’t stretch your morals, it does increase interpersonal sensitivity. Next time your partner is rude, forgetful, or, outright mean without meaning to be, make them read a romance book. I personally recommend They Both Die at the End by Adam Silvera or November 9 by Colleen Hoover.
Now that I’ve gone over most of the main genres, I’d like to add that morally complex characters and situations with lots of gray areas will stretch your morals, regardless of the genre. Certain genres are just known for specific tropes.
I cannot write about morality and reading without considering confirmation bias. Confirmation bias occurs when you seek out facts that confirm your preexisting beliefs. If it goes against what you believe, you dismiss it to reduce your mental discomfort (also known as cognitive dissonance) caused by that fact and continue to turn to what you know. It makes you comfortable.
Following this logic, people are more likely to seek out literature that confirms their preexisting moral standards. If you look at the world with a strict set of rules, you likely love mysteries and “whodunnits”. If you prefer to live in the gray, fantasy and science fiction may be more your jam. You read these and they reconfirm what you already believe.
The relationship is synergistic. What you believe influences what you read and what you read influences what you believe.
Isn’t that fun?
Returning to the men on the mountain, how would you react? Would you wait by his side while he bleeds out and dies? Would you kill him if he asked you to? Or would you fight, tooth and nail, against all odds to carry him down the rocky mountain to help?
Here are the papers I read to write this. I highly recommend checking them out. There are a lot of interesting facts here.
Black, J. E., Capps, S. C., & Barnes, J. L. (2018). Fiction, genre exposure, and moral reality. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 12(3), 328–340. https://doi.org/10.1037/aca0000116
Richter, T., Appel, M., & Calio, F. (2013). Stories can influence the self-concept. Social Influence, 9(3), 172–188. https://doi.org/10.1080/15534510.2013.799099
Xu, W., Gao, Q., Yu, X., Guo, J., & Wang, R. (2022). Cumulative reading engagement predicts individual sensitivity to moral judgment: The mediating role of Social Processing Tendencies. Studia Psychologica, 64(3), 268–282. https://doi.org/10.31577/sp.2022.03.853