Regulatory Focus and Audience Morality: Examining Relationships Between Message Orientation and Moral Intuitions

Moral foundations theory (MFT) is a psychological framework describing innate and modular moral intuitions. The current study integrates MFT with a motivational conception of morality to link it with regulatory focus theory. By combining these frameworks, we predict that a prevention-focused (vs. promotion-focused) advertising message will prime emphasis of moral domains for in-group loyalty, respect for authority, and moral purity among college students. The framework also suggests that emphasis of these three domains will be positively associated with favorable appraisals of prevention-focused messages. Results support the notion that prevention-focused (vs. promotion-focused) messages prime the three domains but contradict the expectation that these domains are positively associated with favorable appraisals of prevention-focused messages. Observations show that they are, rather, positively associated with favorable appraisals of the promotion-focused message. Discussion centers on interpreting these contradictory findings as well as the importance of moral psychology to advertising and communication literature.