| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立交通大學 === 傳播研究所 === 103 === By using The Walking Dead as the example, this research mainly focuses on its moral issues and how audiences make these moral judgments. The research first uses content analysis to analyze the moral conflicts from 58 episodes including season one to the half of season five. Then, a 27-responsers’ in-depth interview is adopted to explore audiences’ viewing experience, especially their moral judgments of characters’ behaviors, and the following affective disposition toward the characters.
Main results from content analysis show that moral conflict situation is composed by negative and positive moralities, and most of the moral conflict situations are composed by harm and cheating, which are the most frequently negative moralities in the story, and loyalty and authority, which are contrary the most frequently positive moralities in the situation. Additionally, results from in-depth interview show that: 1) perceived reality and the uniqueness of context are attractive factors; 2) audiences’ moral judgment and affective disposition are much more complicated and delicate.
Putting two studies together, the research discovers that the zombie-apocalypse setting will cause audiences’ moral disengagement from characters’ negative behavior. Audiences recognize grey-zone characters, which break down the black-or-white judgment in traditional affective disposition theory. Audiences may make a negative moral judgment, but may not consider the character a bad guy. In other words, audiences can rationally point out negative moral behaviors from favored character.
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