Don’t Believe the Truth?

• Yes, this is a real study funded by a real, respected university. This is not just for the bit. As you will see, I had academic ulterior motives for using gcest in an experiment

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• Yes, this was approved by an Institutional Review Board/Ethics Board. Much like the average Oasis interview, they asked very few follow-up questions.

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• The results I will be presenting are not peer reviewed or published (yet). Please do not circulate this presentation outside of tumblr without my permission.

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• No I have no work-life balance

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A few things first.

• I (Cleo) am a PhD candidate in the field of media psychology. I use quantitative (statistical) research methods to study how audiences form perceptions of entertainment media figures. This includes both fictional characters and real people like celebrities.�
• I am particularly interested in how moral judgement differs (or does not differ) between reality and fiction.

Who Am I?

• If you’re on tumblr, you’ve probably seen a lot of people defending their enjoyment of morally flawed characters – on the basis of them being fictional

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• However, if you’ve opened this presentation on my Oasis RPF blog, you probably also enjoy real celebrities for similar reasons

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• That begs the question:

Do people actually make harsher moral judgements of real others as compared to fictional others? And either way, why?

What We(I) Want To Know:

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Does the reality-status of a media persona affect the extent to which moral judgement contributes to overall attitudes?

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• There’s been prior work on this in media psych, but in short, the evidence is mixed. Some studies find that there ARE differences in judgement between fiction and reality, while others don’t.
• There’s also a lot of psychology theories that make implicit assumptions about this, like my mortal enemy Affective Disposition Theory (Zillmann, 2000). We won’t get into that.

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• My personal academic goal with this study is to demonstrate that none of the studies that have explored this before have been studying it correctly. Their experimental methods are flawed in a subtle but important way.
• It’s kind of hard to explain from the ground-up, but bear with me...

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What We Already “Know”  

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“Can you just get to the brotherfucking already?”

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No.

In most prior experimental studies on this topic, participants are randomly assigned to one of two groups (conditions). In one, they are shown a story labelled as fictional. In the other, they are shown the same story labelled as real. This is the most intuitive way to do it, but it comes with a couple problems:

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1) The stories aren’t that convincing. Usually, they’re something that the researchers just made up themselves or got from a book of short stories. It’s possible that participants in the ”real story” condition don’t ACTUALLY believe the researchers. This is not good. If your participants don’t buy it, you basically have two different fiction conditions instead of a real and a fictional condition.

2) Switching the context of the same story from fiction to reality can ALSO switch the context from entertainment to non-entertainment. For instance, a short story described as “real news” is now, well, news, not just a story. That difference might have implications for how audiences interpret character’s behaviors. I strongly suspect that people are likely to weaken their moral judgements in entertainment contexts.

• This means that I need to “control for” entertainment context. That is, both the real and the fictional conditions need to be clearly entertainment-related.

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• I also want a verifiably real story to base my stimuli on (rather than starting from something I just made up and calling it real) As I said, if it’s not obviously true, participants may not really believe me, and treat the “real” condition as hypothetically real, which likely leads to different responses.

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• There’s also a specific kind of moral judgement that would be beneficial to study...

Moral Purity

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• There are many “domains” of morality, sometimes called moral intuitions. Purity is the intuition towards avoidance of literal and social “contamination”. It’s associated not just with regular moral judgement, but with DISGUST.

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• Typical examples of purity violations include cannibalism, bestiality, drug use, sacrilege, and... other things.

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• Research on purity is kind of a mess, but that makes it worth exploring further.

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bonkers figure from Gray et al., 2022

Given all this, I want a documented example of a real entertainment media figure committing a moral purity violation, which I can use as the basis for study design.

☺

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...Luckily, I know a couple people who fit the bill

Like a lover, like a brother

Like a lover, oh

• Consensual sibling incest has a LONG history of use as an example/outright focus in moral purity studies, so there’s actual methodological precedent (e.g., Royzman et al. 2014)

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• It’s very funny. (I can explore the extent to which amusement affects judgement)

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• It makes people upset with you to bring up (an immediate, strong moral disgust reaction – exactly what I need!)

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• Oasis is right in the familiarity sweet spot (everyone has heard Wonderwall but almost no one knows about...all of That)

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• The amount of evidence makes it feel like a more grounded, realistic narrative. It’s very believable (...unless you’re already an Oasis fan, but that’s for another study)

Other Benefits of Choosing gcest

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First, I ran an online pre-test in which potential participants were asked to identify ”random” pictures of celebrities. Two of the pictures were of Liam and Noel.

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Anyone who did NOT recognize them (about 67% of participants) were invited back for the main part of the study.

What I did.

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• In the main study, 475 participants (balanced for age, gender, and racial demographics in the US) were shown a series of anecdotes about the Gallaghers, under the pretense that the stories were summaries of events in an unreleased documentary.
• The anecdotes slowly increase in suspiciousness, culminating in Loch Lomond.

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• 1/3 of the participants were told Noel and Liam’s real names, and that Oasis is a real band known for famous songs like Wonderwall (etc.)
• 1/3 were told that they were “Thomas and Paul Sweeney”, two characters in a fictional band called The Rain.
• 1/3 were also told about The Rain, but were still told that they were REAL (which is what most studies in the past have done. I called this the “pseudo-real” condition)

What I did.

Here’s an example of the same vignette from the real versus the fictional and pseudo-real conditions. They’re written more simplistically than I would like, but its standard to write for a ~14 year old reading level for participants from the general population.

I made all of these fake movie posters to, you know, increase believability.

• There was also a second set of conditions. In the Loch Lomond anecdote, half of the participants saw a very tame photo that did not include the actual kiss. The other half, however, saw the tongue-iest shot of them all.

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• This was to test the effects of exemplification. That is, I wanted to know whether actually VISUALLY showing the incest made a difference in judgements of the act, or believability.

What else I did.

What I Measured:

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• Moral perceptions of Noel (I picked on him instead of making participants answer twice as many questions about both of them)

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• Character liking, enjoyment, appreciation, depth, and lots of other common character perceptions we measure in my research area

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• Story evaluations: realistic, believable, surprising, amusing, etc.

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• Cognitive reflection ability (like a mini IQ but y’know. legitimate)

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• Need for cognition (how much you like to think, like in general)

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• Situational disgust and overall disgust sensitivity

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• Moral viewpoints on consensual sibling incest

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• AND MORE

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RESULTS

You are going to see a lot of graphs and statistical gobbledygook, which will probably mean nothing to most of you, but I will explain in words everything you actually need to understand.

NOEL LIKING

NOEL MORAL APPROVAL

Scale: 1-7 (4 is “neutral” midpoint)

Mean: 3.05

Standard Deviation: 1.26

Scale: 1-7 (4 is “neutral” midpoint)

Mean: 2.17

Standard Deviation: 1.37

On average, people didn’t like Noel all that much, and they REALLY did not morally approve of his behavior.

(that right chart is like, hilariously skewed)

That’s probably because of how much people disapproved of consensual sibling incest. Less than 10% of the participants felt neutral or positive towards it.

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(incest approval and moral approval of Noel correlated at r = .42, which is pretty high for media psych stuff)

Scale: 1-7 (4 is “neutral” midpoint)

Mean: 2.17

Standard Deviation: 1.15

Although humor and morality are ostensibly unrelated, people who thought Noel was funnier thought he was a better person morally. I think some of us can relate to this thought pattern.

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This test is called linear regression ☺

CARE

FAIRNESS

LOYALTY

AUTHORITY

PURITY

Comparing different “domains” of morality, people obviously found Noel the lowest in moral purity, but he was at the midpoint for other domains like care, so it looks like even if people thought his actions were morally disgusting, they understood that he loves Liam.

Yes stats people I still use SPSS. She is a dying old horse and I love her.

Getting into comparing conditions, oddly, people who thought the story was fictional disapproved of Noel’s behavior MORE. The size of the difference is small, but still statistically significant. I suspect people might have felt pity for Noel more when they knew he was real.

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Surprisingly, there were no differences in feelings of disgust across conditions.

This test is called a factorial ANOVA☺

People were also slightly MORE interested in the story when they thought that it was real, which makes sense.

This is the part that I care about the most and you probably don’t.

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People found the “pseudo-real” condition (which remember, is what most studies have as their ”real condition”) the LEAST believable by a lot.

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In the actually real condition, it helped to include vivid depictions (the kiss) rather than just leave it to the imagination.

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That means I’m right. Yay!

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That also means lots of prior studies are fundamentally flawed. Unyay.

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People were also more likely to believe that my made-up documentary was real if I included the kiss, and the real condition was still more believable on average than the pseudo-real condition.

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(It matters less if the people in the fictional condition believe it, because even if the documentary is made up, that’s still fiction)

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Okay but back to stuff for you...

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As you saw earlier, I asked people to report on their approval of consensual sibling incest.

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Consistently, people who were more open to incest thought Noel was a better person, liked him better, and enjoyed him (and the story) more. Makes sense.

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Replicating a study by Royzman et al. (2014), people who were higher in cognitive reflection and the trait “need for cognition” were more approving of consensual sibling incest. Again, the effect size is small, but still statistically significant.

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You heard it folks, smarter people think gcest is okay (Kidding. Mostly.)

People who leaned more left politically were also less likely to disapprove of incest in general and of Noel specifically.

(I probably won’t report this in my real publication because it might get used for evil. I can see the “Democrats Think Incest Should Be Legal” headline)

So what did we learn? (Summary)

• Overall, people disapproved heavily of both sibling incest in general and Noel’s behavior in particular. Not surprising.
• Those who approved of incest more liked Noel better and were less judgmental of him
• Those who thought Noel was funnier thought he was also less immoral
• People were marginally less judgmental of Noel when they knew he was real.
• The “pseudo-real” condition DID harm believability, calling into question the findings of prior studies that only used that kind of condition instead of a real real one. I am correct and sexy.
• People who scored higher on traits related to critical thinking were less disapproving of consensual sibling incest
• People who leaned leftwards politically were less disapproving of incest

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Oh yeah, in the debriefing before ending the study, I had to tell all of the people in the fictional and pseudo-real conditions that this all ACTUALLY happened in real life

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After revealing this, I asked them all if their opinions changed at all. They largely stayed the same, but to finish off, here were some of my favorite comments:

GROSS :(

I guess Noel isn't that all bad but he still does feel distasteful.

it wouldn't be the first time two siblings kissed, as its been going on for centuries.

Well it has opened my eyes to things that occur in real life

I can't believe they would do that and I want to know more.  I find it disgusting.  But I am wondering if they do care for each other.

i can deal with two sisters doing it but two guys is gross real or fake. just disgusting

The story itself made me wonder how emotionally dependent both siblings were on each other, along with how long this attachment continued to manifest as time went on. As mentioned previously, their father was abusive, leaving Noel as the sole caretaker of Liam. It leads me to believe that both siblings unfortunately developed an extremely unhealthy attachment to each other (Emotional incest), which further manifested into physical feelings. I am curious to know if other people in their lives knew about the siblings and their unhealthy attachment towards each other. Knowing that these events were real does not change my perspective regarding their life story.

 I dont think I can enjoy wonderwall anymore, thanks

Knowing it's real makes me think more about the fact that people can't really control what they feel, they just feel it.  And that's not something they or their actions should be punished for if all parties involved share the same feelings and consent.

It makes me even more disturbed because in my mind initially it was made up by someone with a twisted/perverse mind.