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Abstract. The current study adopts a broad-based model of media and audience values as well as recent understandings of enjoyment versus appreciation to predict that aggregate audience appraisals should be related to film budget, gross, and measures of viewership differently depending on the type of appraisal elicited. Data suggest both enjoyment and appreciation are positively related to measures of aggregate selective exposure when controlling for film budget. This finding challenges a view that appreciation is negatively related to success. Discussion centers on implications for understanding potential functional aspects of audience appraisals and suggests future research on audience morality and media production.

Abstract. The model of intuitive morality and exemplars (MIME) predicts that media content can increase the accessibility of preconscious moral intuitions, which shape subsequent moral decision making. To date, attempts to demonstrate evidence of this intuitive, preconscious process with self-report measures have met with little success. The current paper presents results from a study designed to test the MIME’s predictions, measuring the accessibility of moral intuitions with a moral foundations–affect misattribution procedure (MF-AMP) argued in the current paper to be more capable of detecting the aforementioned effect. An experiment manipulated exposure to media content that focused on care and fairness to test the proposition that media content can increase the accessibility of these moral intuitions. The findings offer preliminary evidence supporting the MIME’s proposition that media content featuring behaviors relevant to specific moral intuitions can increase (temporarily at least) the accessibility of those specific moral intuitions in the audiences.