Understanding how individuals engage with narrative works they consider morally deviant and characters they consider morally “othered” is important to understand the boundaries of what people can or will moralize in their own imagination. We investigated this “imaginative resistance” (i.e., refusal or aversion to engage in a work that crosses a pre-established boundary) and had participants (N = 518) write both morally deviant and non-moral narratives. We then looked at associations among imagin…
Read moreUnderstanding how individuals engage with narrative works they consider morally deviant and characters they consider morally “othered” is important to understand the boundaries of what people can or will moralize in their own imagination. We investigated this “imaginative resistance” (i.e., refusal or aversion to engage in a work that crosses a pre-established boundary) and had participants (N = 518) write both morally deviant and non-moral narratives. We then looked at associations among imaginative resistance, moral permissibility, religiosity, and modal possibility. Imaginative resistance was measured through participants' self-report of fulfilling writing prompts, ease of imagining, and independent coders’ reports of prompt fulfillment. Participants displayed more imaginative resistance to a morally deviant than a non-moral prompt, though they tended to self-report more imaginative resistance to the deviant prompt than was actually shown through coding. General moral permissibility predicted self-reported ease of imagining. Religiosity did not predict self-report measures of imaginative resistance but did predict coded prompt-completion. Modal possibility did not predict either self-report or coded imaginative resistance. We argue for the necessity of observed measures of imaginative resistance as well as self-report measures to fully investigate this construct.
