The Impact of Terrorist Attack News on Moral Intuitions

Previous research demonstrated that exposure to news of the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, France increased the salience of moral intuitions associated with respect for authority and purity in a sample of U.S. participants. The present study attempted to replicate this finding with news of domestic terrorism by examining the effect of exposure to news of the 2017 Las Vegas, Nevada music festival shooting. Approximately three weeks before the Las Vegas shooting occurred, participants (N = 195) drawn from a population similar to the original study completed a survey measuring their moral intuition salience. Four days after the event, participants (N = 162) read either news coverage of the shooting or a control story and once again completed a survey measuring their moral intuition salience. Our results replicated previous findings from research on the Paris terrorist attacks. Exposure to news of the Las Vegas terrorist attack increased the salience of respect for authority and purity. We discuss how our findings are in line with logic suggesting that news of a terrorist attacks can threaten audiences’ perceptions of societal safety, strengthen the need for societal cohesion, and increase the salience of binding moral intuitions.