A persuasive argument is built from a claim, evidence and a conclusion, which is what everybody was taught. A story does none of that and changes attitudes anyway. A pooled two decades of research on the phenomenon in which a reader mentally enters the world a story evokes. Through what does it work?
Through , and the more of it the better. Pooling 132 effect sizes from 76 published and unpublished articles, the analysis found stronger transportation going with in the direction of the story’s message. A story does not necessarily bypass thinking. It hands the claim characters, causes and consequences that a reader can rather than weigh.
A direct argument asks the reader to evaluate evidence. A story invites them first to imagine a situation and then to follow what happens to the people in it, which is a different cognitive activity altogether.
The research had accumulated across anthropology, marketing, psychology, communication and literary studies without ever being systematized. So the authors built an extended transportation-imagery model, covering what produces transportation and what it produces in turn.
They then tested it quantitatively, pooling 132 effect sizes from 76 published and unpublished articles. Stronger transportation went with persuasion consistent with the message, and the effect appeared across beliefs, attitudes and intentions, though its size varied between studies.
Two cautions belong with it. Transportation is not a stamp of truth, since a fabricated story can be deeply transporting, so the power of the structure is worth separating from the quality of the facts inside it. And some pooled studies are correlational, where people who already agree may be the ones who get drawn in.
wat. The further people were drawn into a story, the more the message inside it tended to move them.
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Stories are used in education, health and advertising, so understanding the mechanism helps both in using them well and in noticing when one is being used on you.
How do we know?
Van Laer and colleagues built an extended transportation-imagery model of the antecedents and consequences of narrative transportation, and tested it with a quantitative meta-analysis of 132 effect sizes drawn from 76 articles.
What is still unknown
Studies differ in the kind of story and in how each one gauged persuasion, and a correlation between transportation and attitude does not always show that the first produced the second.
Learn something?
Where to next
Do spoilers really make a story more enjoyable?reading
Can a few minutes with a text change how well you read another person?reading
What happens when a story makes you forget the room you are in?persuasion