Associate Professor Matthew Grizzard and graduate students Charles Monge, Annie Dooley, Lucy Brown, and Samantha Flanagan were among the authors of “Validation of the Character Morality-as-Cooperation Questionnaire" named 2024 Top Method Paper by the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication.

The paper presents a series of work over three studies that use a “known-groups” paradigm, where people think of characters that are heroes, antiheroes or villains, and then fill out a Character Morality-as-Cooperaation Questionnaire. If the CMACQ works properly, it is expected that heroes would be ranked the most moral, villains are not moral, and antiheroes are somewhere in the middle. This proved to work across three studies, giving communication researchers the ability to measure morality in the same way that the Morality-as-Cooperation theory describes it.

The paper will be presented at the annual AEJMC Conference, Representation and Voice: The Future of Democracy, Communication Theory and Methodology Division Top Paper Session on Aug. 10 in Philadelphia.