Toward Defining Prosocial and Antisocial Media Content in Terms of Intuitive Motivations

Prosocial and antisocial media content and effects have been a major focus of media scholars. Given this importance, we might expect the terms prosocial and antisocial to be well defined in this context. Yet, these terms as well as the media content and effects they describe do not have definitions that are widely shared by scholars. We reason that the definitional ambiguity of these terms has introduced error into efforts to understand prosocial and antisocial media content and effects. As such, we argue the need for scholars studying these topics to use coherent, clear, and commonly shared definitions of these terms. With this in mind, we offer a definition of prosocial and antisocial media content and effects based on the upholding and violation of overridingly salient intuitive altruistic intuitive motivations. We argue that media psychologists (as well as general population members) inherently use this conception to define these terms and present four survey studies supporting this claim. We reason that adopting a shared definition of prosocial and antisocial media content and effects could (1) help identify and account for inconsistencies in past research on these topics and (2) give rise to greater coherence in future work examining both the patterns of intuitive motivations represented in media content and the subsequent influence of media on audiences exposed to these content patterns.