American Psychological Association Research Papers (original) (raw)

Transportation was proposed as a mechanism whereby narratives can affect beliefs. Defined as absorption into a story, transportation entails imagery, affect, and attentional focus. A transportation scale was developed and validated. Experiment 1 (N = 97) demonstrated that extent of transportation augmented story-consistent beliefs and favorable evaluations of protagonists. Experiment 2 (N = 69) showed that highly transported readers found fewer false notes in a story than less-transported readers. Experiments 3 (N = 274) and 4 (N = 258) again replicated the effects of transportation on beliefs and evaluations; in the latter study, transportation was directly manipulated by using processing instructions. Reduced transportation led to reduced story-consistent beliefs and evaluations. The studies alSO showed that transportation and corresponding beliefs were generally unaffected by labeling a story as fact or as fiction. The scientific study of persuasion has reflected an unfortunate displacement of poetics by rhetoric. Advocacy messages rather than narrative messages have been the subject matter of persuasion scholars for the past half-century (e.g., Hovland, Lumsdaine, & Sheffield, 1949; Shavitt & Brock, 1994). This striking imbalance in scientific attention has been sustained even though in the experience of people everywhere, public narrative predominates over public advocacy: Novels, films, soap operas, music lyrics, stories in newspapers, magazines, TV, and radio command far more waking attention than do advertisements, sermons, editorials, billboards, and so forth. The power of narratives to change beliefs has never been doubted and has always been feared. Consequently, censorship has been ubiquitous for centuries: In the United States,. one out of three high school students experiences banning of books (Davis, 1979). A film version of Lolita, the "fourth best Englishlanguage novel published this century" (Modem Library Editorial Board, 1998), was withheld for 2 years from American audiences. Yet, the persuasive impact of public narratives has been virtually ignored by empirical researchers; indeed, persuasiveness of narrafives is a nonexistent reference item in a recent authoritative, comprehensive graduate-level textbook with 2,800 references (The Psychology of Attitudes, Eagly & Chaiken, 1993). In an attempt to redress the rhetoric-poetics imbalance, we explored the persuasive impact of a narrative in terms of the extent to which recipients