The Effects of Narrative Transportation on Persuasion by Conflicting Narratives (2012)
Undergraduate: Stephanie Thomas
Faculty Advisor: Melanie Green
Department: Psychology & Neuroscience
Previous research has revealed that narratives can influence subsequent judgments. “Transportation into a narrative world,” or complete immersion into a story, has been found to be an especially effective method of persuasion in that people who are more transported into a story tend to be more persuaded by it as well. One issue that has not been fully addressed is how people resolve conflicting narrative information. We hypothesized that in a judgment case where there is both a highly transporting and less transporting story, people will be drawn in by the transporting story and will likely base their attitudes on the protagonist of that story, even when the information in that story is less relevant than the information in the less transporting story. In this study, 126 UNC undergraduate participants read two testimonials, endorsing different treatments for a fictional medical disorder ELD. There was both a transporting and non-transporting version for each of the treatment testimonials. Participants then made a decision on the appropriate treatment for a target case, which resembled one of the read testimonials but not the other. The results found suggest that relevancy plays the largest role in a participant’s decision, rather than transportation as we predicted. However, a significant interaction was found between the quality of the two stories and a participant’s ultimate treatment decision. An overall preference for one of the treatments, as well as a lack of power in sample size could be explanations for the lack of significance found in our results. The results from our study suggest that participants do make good decisions overall, however, a good quality transporting narrative and an underlying preference for a certain treatment can serve as distractions in making the appropriate decision.