Matthew Grizzard: Moral Judgment in Stories and Real Life

The research of C-SPAM affiliate Matthew Grizzard studies how the moral judgments people make about fictional characters shape their perception of stories—as well as how these judgments translate into the real world. We recently sat down with Grizzard to discuss his work and its connection to the science of polarization and misinformation. The conversation below has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Lauren Pond: Would you tell me about your research and how it has evolved?

Matthew Grizzard: Broadly, my work looks at moral understandings and how we make moral judgments of characters and narratives. A lot of the work we've done shows that the same moral reasoning that we would apply outside of narratives also applies within narratives. So my research is focused on understanding: How do we make judgments of right and wrong, what does that predict in terms of story enjoyment, and how does this reflect real-world moral judgment processing?

Recently, my work shows that when we judge characters in a story, we're not making judgments of each character individually; rather, we’re considering the relationships between characters. The initial side-taking that we do predicts how we're going to feel about other characters. So if I come into a story and I like a specific character, if I find out that this character has some kind of rivalry or competition with another character, I'm already going to be biased to dislike that other character, perceive them to be less moral, and perceive their immoral actions to be even more immoral. And the character that I like, I would perceive their actions to be more moral.


LP: This gets me thinking a little bit about the character interdependence concept you mention in your TEDx talk. You gave the example of the character Walter White in Breaking Bad. For all intents and purposes, White is a bad guy and one who becomes gradually worse. And yet you still find yourself rooting for him in some capacity.

MG: Exactly, right? Protagonists in a story can get worse and worse, but for us to stay liking them and to stay rooting for them, we usually have to see somebody worse than them in that same situation. We have to see somebody even more immoral in order to maintain our liking.
 

LP: So why do you think morality is such a big part of how we judge characters?

MG: I personally think it's probably creeping into everything we do. Our evolutionary heritage predisposes us to look for social cheaters: anybody who's going to potentially take advantage of us. And so, when we meet somebody, a lot of research in psychology says that we ask ourselves two questions: “Can this person do me harm?” and “Does this person desire to do me harm?” That desire to do harm is a basis for a lot of moral judgments. Is this person capable of hurting me, yes or no? This predisposes me to like or dislike them.

But those moral judgments are creeping in everywhere. I think if you were to ask Ohio State fans, “Who is the most immoral football team?”, they're immediately going to say Michigan, right? And they're going to have all sorts of reasons to point to it, whether it was that Michigan cheated by filming other teams’ practices, or the planting of the Michigan flag last year in the Shoe after the big game. 

But if you were to ask Michigan who's the most immoral, they're probably going to say Ohio State. If you were to ask UNC, they're going to say Duke. If you were to ask Duke, they're going to say UNC. And so this morality element is something that I think we're doing all the time. We can't turn it off, essentially.


LP: It's just kind of part of human nature. 

MG: Yes. It's helping us figure who can hurt us and who can't hurt us, and a lot of times, we need to pay attention to the people who are immoral more than we need to pay attention to the people who are moral. If I see two characters in a story, I might be drawn to pay attention more to the immoral villain, simply because I'm kind of biased to look out for them. What could they do to me? What could they do to this other character?

LP: What do you think are the implications of these kinds of judgments outside of fictional stories?

MG: A lot of the people that we have experiences with, we know personally, but there's also this whole realm of people we have experiences with in the modern world that we don't know personally. This could be politicians, celebrities, athletes—all sorts of individuals.

We’ve got some more recent research showing that when we are evaluating people in our everyday lives, we are evaluating them slightly differently than we would a character in a story. But when we evaluate a politician, for example—somebody that we don't have interpersonal, direct contact with—we tend to be evaluate them much more like a character in a story. For all intents and purposes, even though they're a real person, in our mind, they're a character, and they're fulfilling some kind of role.

If we can understand these processes and how they develop in a story in an isolated setting—in kind of a neutral setting that doesn't come with historical baggage and our innate biases—we'll be better equipped to understand how they play out in the real world. Narratives allow us to study the template of these processes in an environment where we can understand them more cleanly, and then we can apply these understandings.

LP: On a related note, what do you think is the significance of your work in the study of the science of polarization and misinformation? 

MG: I think with polarization, my work kind of is explaining why we might see these types of processes. I think it's pulling in a really basic psychological process, which is contrast and assimilation effects. A typical demonstration you can do to make this hit home is this is to take a cup of lukewarm water, a cup of ice-cold water, and a cup of hot water. If you put your fingers in the hot water, and then you touch the lukewarm water, it's going to seem cold, but if you do the opposite, it's going to seem warm. Our evaluations of the world seem to largely be a comparative process. We're always judging things in relationship to one another.

So I think that's where my work is applicable to polarization. If we can understand the baseline perceptions that exist, we can understand how they get exaggerated and amplified within political settings.

LP: After talking with you about your work, I’m going to assume you’re familiar with moral psychology, and with Kurt Gray’s argument that divisions often arise because people are going to do us harm?

MG: Yes. I think part of it, too—and I'd love to work with Kurt on this—is that idea that we don't always think about harm at first, right? If we just feel that there are differences between the groups we are a part of, if we feel like we're in this group and that person's in a different group, there's probably a bias that produces perceptions of risk and harm.  I'm going to assume the person in the other group is more likely to do me harm than the people in my own group because of that kind of comparative polarization process.

LP: What do you think are the practical applications of your research outside of the institution?

MG: I think part of trying to make the world a better place is creating situations where we can see similarities between ourselves and other people. In those situations, we'll be less likely to get the contrast effects that produce polarization. So if I can see similarities between my group and another group, I'd be more likely to engage in assimilation, viewing them similarly to myself, and then making judgments in a manner similar to how I would judge myself and my own group. If we were trying to design interventions to get it to where people would discuss things across the aisle more often, we would probably want to emphasize similarities between individuals and minimize differences. And that can serve as a starting point for those conversations.

I think it's also a touchy area, though, because some of the disagreements that we have right now are not historically typical political disagreements; they are fundamental disagreements about democratic norms. For instance, we've seen arguments over the use of federal forces in U.S. cities without local consent, or attacks on freedom of the press, such as the White House suing CBS, leading to a settlement. You don't want to create an intervention where you're essentially saying, "Hey, that group doesn't believe this group deserves fundamental rights; let's find a compromise." That is a problematic stance. The core risk of these assimilation interventions is that they could inadvertently normalize things like attacks on the freedom of the press or the deprivation of individuals’ rights by treating them as a disagreement ripe for compromise.


LP: Have you done any sort of interventionist work like this?

MG: I've been thinking about how my research could be applied, but I'm always nervous to do intervention work, because I always feel like I could make it worse rather than make it better. 

LP: Are there any specific projects you're working on that you’d like to talk about?

MG: We've been developing experimental procedures and measures for assessing morality along various domains. For example, we have validated a scale for measuring the moral perceptions of characters along five different domains of morality. 

So just a quick background: Moral Foundations Theory argues that there are five distinct concerns that humans have for evaluating the morality of something or someone. There’s care/harm: Does it hurt someone else? Fairness/justice: Is it fair, and is it representative of equality or tit-for-tat justice? In-group loyalty: Is it related to betraying or maintaining bonds with a group? Respect for authority: Are you respecting legitimate hierarchies of authority within society? And then, purity: Does it involve carnal pleasure and things like that? A few years ago, we validated a measure to assess perceptions of someone else’s morality—whether it’s a character or a person—along these domains.

More recently, a researcher in England named Oliver Scott Curry proposed an alternative domain-specific moral theory called “morality as cooperation theory.” It’s similar to Moral Foundations Theory in the extent that it both say there are distinct domains of morality. But Curry’s theory posits seven, which are based on distinct theoretical assumptions. So we've been working on some validation studies to get a valid and reliable measure for perceptions of people’s morality that is based in Morality as Cooperation Theory. We're working on this scale to try to eventually pit these two theories against one another and see which theory is better at explaining the moral perceptions of characters.

LP: Unrelated, really, but how was your TEDx experience? 

MG: It was fun; but it was more stressful than I anticipated. It's cool that it's all undergraduates running it at OSU, and so I think that makes it pretty different from other TEDx programs. I got a lot out of it and I think the students planning it got a lot out of it too. I was pretty pleased with how my talk turned out thanks to their hard work.

LP: I enjoyed it. The bit about Walter White resonated; Breaking Bad is one of my favorite shows of all time.

MG: Yeah, totally. That one and The Sopranos are my favorites. I've probably watched the entire series of The Sopranos six or seven times at this point, and it always shocks me that when I think back on the first couple of times I watched it, I was still rooting for Tony. Now that I've seen it so many times, I'm just like: He was a total sociopath the entire time. Everything any character says that's bad about him at the beginning turns out to be true at the end. And yeah, you don't realize it when you’re first watching, probably because you think the other characters are somehow worse than him.