ABSTRACT
In a post-truth era, communication plays an important and sensitive role, related to the growing importance of social networks. In this context, social and political influencers occupy a key position, as they can have an influence not only on our purchases, but also on the way we think and act. In fact, moral judgments can be affected by different variables, both moral and non-moral. For example, we are biased toward believing that certain characteristics of behavior or personality go together. This kind of bias can be included in what is called “Halo eEffect,” namely the tendency to use the evaluation of unrelated aspects to make judgments about something or someone’s personality. The present study aims at assessing how non-moral aspects, such as fortuitous events or general abilities, can affect the judgment of someone’s virtues. To prove this, we have designed two experiments to reproduce the typical information available in a daily context. The first experiment shows that narratives about Abilities, Fortuitous events, and Gender affect significantly the judgment of moral virtues; the second one couples pictures and narratives to create a more complex stimulus about a single fictional character, to simulate typical posts on a social network more closely. Findings have confirmed our previous results. Indeed, influencers in social media communication might exploit the “Halo Effect” to control and orient the public’s judgments and preferences, by displaying what we called the “Triple Trick of Communication on Social Networks,” that is, the nudging pressure induced by the internet spiderweb to shape people’s opinions in order to obtain certain behaviors. This tendency, having a strong impact on our lives, could benefit from the virtue of practical wisdom, which might work as a protector against cognitive and behavioral manipulations. Phronēsis—in the sense of practical wisdom—could play a corrective role in the unwarranted generalizations induced by the “Halo Effect” with its correlated post-truth communicative biases, through the development of phronetic abduction. Phronetic abduction can be defined as the ability to find the best moral explanation for an observed behavior, eventually rewriting or creating proper ethical norms or generalizations.
