Roscoe C Scarborough and Charles Allan McCoy. Moral Reactions to Reality TV: Television viewers’ endogenous and exogenous loci of morality. Journal of Consumer Culture, 1469540514521078, first published on February 3, 2014.

Drawing upon a survey and 41 semi-structured interviews with television consumers, the article examines the negative moral reactions that some people have to contemporary reality television. The article explores the relationship between cultural preferences and moral condemnation. Television consumers who have a moral reaction to reality TV are more likely to be from a higher socio-economic position and are less likely to consume the genre. To more fully understand some viewers’ negative moral reactions to reality television, the article examines the moral reasoning of television consumers. Moral reactions to reality TV can be classified as endogenous and exogenous. An endogenous focus is concerned with the immorality of consumption. An exogenous focus locates morality in cultural production. These moral positions are also socially patterned; television consumers with an exogenous locus of morality possess higher levels of cultural capital, greater education and are less likely to consume reality TV. The article contends that cultural taste is being turned into moral condemnation. In other words, when cultural consumption is linked to moral position then a strong symbolic boundary can be formed that reinforces real-world boundaries amongst social groups. This condemnation serves to harden cultural, symbolic boundaries rooted in classed consumption practices.

Tobias Greitemeyer and Dirk O. Mügge. Video Games Do Affect Social Outcomes: A Meta-Analytic Review of the Effects of Violent and Prosocial Video Game Play. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, May 2014; vol. 40, 5: pp. 578-589.

Whether video game play affects social behavior is a topic of debate. Many argue that aggression and helping are affected by video game play, whereas this stance is disputed by others. The article provides a meta-analytical test of the idea that depending on their content, video games do affect social outcomes. Data from 98 independent studies with 36,965 participants revealed that for both violent video games and prosocial video games, there was a significant association with social outcomes. Whereas violent video games increase aggression and aggression-related variables and decrease prosocial outcomes, prosocial video games have the opposite effects. These effects were reliable across experimental, correlational, and longitudinal studies, indicating that video game exposure causally affects social outcomes and that there are both short- and long-term effects.