Cognitive and emotional processes underlying narrative persuasion

People read, watch or listen to mediated narratives (stories) on a daily basis. For a long time philosophers, politicians, and religious leaders have considered stories as a powerful means to change real-world attitudes and beliefs of the audience. Meanwhile, a large body of studies from psychology and communication science has demonstrated that stories are indeed an efficient means of persuasion. The persuasive impact of narratives on beliefs has been attributed to the potency of stories to engage recipients and to make them feel absorbed and transported into the story world. Confirming this assumption, previous research has shown that recipients who report to be more deeply transported are more strongly persuaded by the narrative. However, the psychological mechanisms facilitating persuasion under high transportation remain unclear. The goal of the proposed research project is to examine the cognitive and emotional processes involved in transportation that underlie the persuasive influence of narratives. Starting from research on narrative experience and persuasion, language comprehension, and two-system models of human information processing, we outline four likely mediational pathways of narrative persuasion and seven experiments designed to test predictions following from these assumptions. The first mediational pathway is the reduction of cognitive-elaborative activities while recipients are being transported into the story world. This mechanism will be examined by using thought- listing, Pinocchio-circling (Experiment 1) and think-aloud protocols (Experiment 2). Second, we assume that transportation while reading is associated with a reduction of epistemic monitoring (i.e., the automatic monitoring of the validity of incoming information) which, in turn, causes persuasive effects on recipients` beliefs. An epistemic Stroop task (Experiment 3) and eye movement data (Experiment 4) will be used to test this assumption. Third, the role of emotional responses as potential mechanisms underlying narrative persuasion will be examined. To this end, Experiments 1-3 will involve an assessment of physiological arousal and emotional valence, in addition to the cognitive process measures. Moreover, emotional processes are the focus of Experiment 5. Fourth, the activation of the associative information processing system is expected to mediate the influence of stories on explicit beliefs. Implicit attitude measures are applied to test this prediction (Experiment 6). In a final experiment, the influence of stories on attitudes and behavior will be examined over a period of up to three months (Experiment 7). Unlike most previous studies that have relied exclusively on retrospective self-report measures such as the Transportation scale, the proposed experiments include several objective measures of cognitive and emotional processes, some of which are obtained during reception. Moreover, the experiments are based on a thorough experimental manipulation of determinants of transportation or its component processes. Beyond the fields of Psychology and Communication Science, the results of this research project will be informative for researchers from other disciplines that deal with narrative persuasion, such as Marketing and Public Health.

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