People’s reaction to news stories: The role of moral exclusion on moral reasoning

Recent events have shown that at times people judge the same action differently owing to the group membership of the person involved. For instance, almost every week in Italy there are news reports of people being run over and even killed by drunken drivers. People’s reactions to such events change radically depending on whether the culprits are Italians or foreigners. When the aggressors are foreigners, the media do not simply evaluate these events as serious news items related to the issue of road safety. Instead, they customarily relate these events to the question of immigration and national security. The issue of how people develop moral knowledge and moral judgment is of theoretical and empirical importance in psychological literature. In this research, the individual conception of community and the boundaries within which people apply their sense of justice is considered as an evidence of the intra-individual variations on moral reasoning. Participants had to judge some news stories. However, the same events were presented as concerning a supposedly morally-included person (an Italian) or a supposedly morally-excluded person (a Rumanian). Results show that when people consider the Rumanian community as lying outside their moral community and their sense of justice, they gave a different and harsher moral evaluation of the event.