Participants completed the following measures (described later) in the
order listed: story-specific beliefs, just-world items, the transportation
questionnaire (Table 1), thought listings, character evaluations, reality
monitoring, source manipulation checks, and a recall test.
Story-specific belief measures. Participants answered a series of storyspecific
belief items. They responded to the statements on a 0-60 scale,
anchored by agree completely and disagree completely, with neither agree
nor disagree as the center point. Topics included freedoms for psychiatric
patients and the likelihood of attacks in public places. For the two violence
items, participants chose from a series of options. The item "Someone is
getting stabbed to death somewhere in the USA" had eight choices, ranging
from every 10 minutes to every month (reverse-scored), and the item "The
likelihood of a stabbing death at an Ohio mall is:" had eight choices,
ranging from once every 50 years to once every week.
Just world. We also expected transportation to affect general beliefs
implicated by the story. Injustice could be considered a theme of "Murder
at the Mall"; an innocent child is randomly murdered because a careless
judicial system allowed a man with a history of violence to walk the streets.
Thus, it was possible that people's general perceptions of a just world
might be swayed by reading about such blatant injustice. To assess this
possibility, we chose global belief items from the Belief in a Just World
Scale (Rubin & Peplau, 1975). We selected items most relevant to the
story, as well as ones that asked directly about just-world views. These
beliefs were assessed on a 0-60 agree-disagree scale.
Creation of dependent variable indexes. To increase the power of our
tests, we created three multi-item indexes from conceptually related dependent
variables? The psychiatric patient index included two items:
"Psychiatric patients who live in an institution should be allowed to go out
in the community during the day" and "Psychiatric patients who have
passes to leave their institution should be free of supervision." Individuals
with story-consistent beliefs would reject these items. The violence index
consisted of ratings of the frequency of stabbing deaths in the United States
and at Ohio malls. The story could lead individuals to think that stabbing
deaths are more likely. The just-world index included "Although there may
be some exceptions, good people often lead lives of suffering" and "By and
large, people get what they deserve" (reverse-scored). Katie did nothing to
bring on her tragic fate; therefore, perceiving an unjust world was
story-consistent.