Children’s Media

Our lab investigates how the media children and adolescents consume—from animated series to young adult literature—acts as a powerful socializing agent for their developing moral systems. We study how narrative content can be leveraged to encourage prosocial behavior, empathy, and a nuanced understanding of social values.

Socializing Morality Through Narrative Media

A significant portion of our research explores how narrative media influences the "moral weight" young audiences place on different values. We examine whether exposure to stories emphasizing specific moral intuitions—such as care, fairness, loyalty, and authority—can shift a child's own intuitive priorities.

Unlike traditional educational media that often focuses on broad "good vs. bad" dichotomies, our work looks at the specific mechanisms through which characters and plotlines activate biological moral sensitivities. This research suggests that children’s moral education is significantly shaped by the stories they engage with daily, providing a supplementary path to formal moral instruction.

Moral Intuition Salience in Early Adolescence

In studies with early adolescents (ages 10–14), we have found that narrative exposure can distinctly influence separate moral values. For example, work published in the Journal of Media Psychology (e.g., Hahn et al., 2022) demonstrates that reading about characters who emphasize specific moral intuitions increases the salience of those same intuitions in the readers themselves.