Table 1.

Questions completed by participants after watching each play excerpt.

A. Identification (based on Tal-Or and Cohen, 2010):

1. I think I understand [name of character] well

2. I understood the events in the scene the way [name of character] understood them

3. While viewing, I felt like [name of character] felt

4. While watching, I could really ‘get inside’ [name of character]‘s head

5. I tend to understand why [name of character] did what [he/she] did

B. Moral approval:

6. I approve of [name of character]‘s behaviour

C. Attribution (from the IPSAQ scale of Kinderman and Bentall, 1996):

Would you say [name of character] behaved this way because this was:

7. Something about [name of character]?

8. Something about the other characters?

9. Something about the situation (circumstances or chance)?

All answers were on a Likert scale (1=strongly disagree; 7=strongly agree). Question 6 (Moral Approval) was converted to a scale of−3 (strongly disapprove) to+3 (strongly approve), centred on 0 (neither approve nor disapprove) so as to make the analyses more intuitive.