Impacts of a Character’s Morality on Audience Perspective Taking and Audience Explanations for Character Behavior

The current study examines the effects of character morality on audience members’ perspective taking processes. Through two experiments, we find people tend to take an actor’s perspective when interpreting moral characters, indicated by higher level of egocentric projection into the character, identification with the character, paying closer attention to their unintentional behaviors, and providing more mechanical causes to explain these behaviors. In contrast, when processing immoral characters, people tend to take an observer’s perspective by focusing more on intentional behaviors. This research extends our understanding of the role of character morality in narrative processing and conditions under which people would use different mental inference strategies to understand a media character.