Individuals encounter narratives constantly in daily life – through books, newspaper articles, and conversations with friends. Despite the ubiquity of narratives in human experience and interaction, the mechanisms by which narratives, even narratives labeled as fictional, can affect individuals’ beliefs have not been well-investigated by psychologists.
The current thesis treated two mechanisms by which narratives may influence people’s beliefs: “transportation” into a narrative world, and attribution of truth to a narrative labeled as fictional. The three primary hypotheses of the thesis were as follows: first, that “transportation” into a narrative world may mediate the effect of narratives and fiction on beliefs; next, that under some circumstances, fiction may be as persuasive as non-fiction; and finally, that one means by which fictional narratives may have an impact is the ascription of truth.
Transportation into a narrative world (e.g., Gerrig, 1993), the subject of the first hypothesis, was conceived of as a distinct mental process. An individual may become so absorbed in a world created by an author that he or she loses access to real world facts. The transported reader (or viewer) may also experience emotions evoked by the story, and thereby may become susceptible to changes in her beliefs.
Chapter 2 of the thesis reported the development and initial validation of a scale designed to measure transportation. Both situational and dispositional versions were constructed, and showed satisfactory psychometric properties.
Chapters 3-5 reported the results of three studies investigating the hypotheses stated above. In Experiment 1, N = 317, participants read either the experimental narrative (a 2000-word story entitled “Murder at the Mall”), which was labeled as either nonfiction, fiction, or a dream, or a control narrative. Instructions attempted to create high versus normal transportation conditions, by either exhorting participants to become involved in the story, or else instructing them to simply pay attention to the story. Participants then responded to the primary dependent measures, general and specific belief measures related to the themes of the story. Participants also rated their degree of transportation into the narrative, and reported whether the events in the story were true (actually occurred) or not true (did not actually occur).
Experiment 2, N = 69, used a similar paradigm, but eliminated the control story, and used only nonfiction and fiction as story sources. Instructions in this experiment attempted to create baseline transportation (“pay attention to the story”) and lowered transportation (“look for difficult words and phrases”) conditions. In addition to the dependent measures discussed above, this experiment also introduced a novel measure, the circling of “false notes”, or “Pinocchios”, to assess the extent of unfavorable cognitive responding to the story.
Experiment 3, N = 59, directly examined belief change as a result of exposure to the experimental narrative by using a pretest/posttest design. Dependentvariables as described in Experiment 1 were measured. Additionally, the third experiment made the fiction/nonfiction status of the narrative more salient by providing the narrative in a format that appeared to be either a newspaper (for the nonfiction condition) or a literary magazine (for the fiction condition).
For all three experiments, male and female Ohio State undergraduates served as participants.
Attempts to manipulate transportation met with limited success; instructions were able to lower, but not increase, transportation into the narrative. More importantly, results of both posttest only and pretest/posttest studies revealed that transportation during exposure to a narrative can influence beliefs. Further, transportation into a narrative world resulted in change on belief items specific to the experimental narrative, as well as more general items (just-world beliefs) that were merely implied by the story. In regards to the second hypothesis, labeling a narrative as fictional did not appear to substantially diminish its impact on beliefs: fiction had persuasive parity with nonfiction.
These studies also showed that a substantial number of participants (mis)reported that the events in a fictional narrative actually occurred (Hypothesis 3). Experiment 3 provided preliminary evidence that attribution of truth to a narrative may be an additional consequence of transportation.
Experiment 2, in addition to investigating transportation and fiction/nonfiction effects, reported the development of a new measure, “Pinocchio circling”, designed to assess the degree of unfavorable cognitive responding to narratives. This measure indicated that highly transported participants found fewer “false notes” in the narrative than their less-transported counterparts.
Taken together, the three studies provided support for the hypotheses and the underlying conceptualization of transportation and truth misattribution.