“That’s Immoral!”

Abstract: Social media are increasingly becoming platforms for moral discussions. Users communicating on a moral level can encourage us to engage with information regarding a moral debate by activating processes that shape our moral judgments. To investigate these processes, this paper studies the effect of attitude congruence and morally-framed arguments on the selection, reading time, and liking of social media content related to moral debates and whether the level of perceived moral relevance of the topic influences the effects’ strength. Further the role of identification with other users when choosing what content to interact with is examined. In a 2 x 2 x 2 mixed design experiment, participants were given an information selection task in which they were shown different posts within a mockup Facebook feed. Here, comment valence (positive vs. negative), type of argumentation within the comment (moral argument vs. no moral argument) and the opinion climate within one’s ingroup (ingroup supports attitude-consistent vs. attitude-inconsistent views) were manipulated. Results supported the confirmation bias regarding the selection and liking of content in social media. The hypothesized effects of moral arguments, relevance and group identification did not influence information selection or reading duration. Exploratory analyses revealed that content accompanied by comments with moral arguments has a higher likelihood of being liked, especially when the issue is seen as morally significant.