Entertainment?Education and Elaboration Likelihood: Understanding the Processing of Narrative Persuasion

TLDR

Entertainment‑education messages influence beliefs, attitudes, and behavior, and elaboration‑likelihood theory suggests that narrative absorption and character engagement enhance persuasion while reducing counterarguing and the importance of topic involvement. The article reviews evidence supporting these propositions and outlines future research to extend them to entertainment‑education contexts, advance persuasion and narrative theory, and explain additional effects such as those proposed by cultivation theory. The authors conduct a literature review of studies that test elaboration‑likelihood propositions within entertainment‑education narratives.

Abstract

The impact of entertainment-education messages on beliefs, attitudes, and behavior is typically explained in terms of social cognitive theory principles. However, important additional insights regarding reasons why entertainment-education messages have effects can be derived from the processing of persuasive content in narrative messages. Elaboration likelihood approaches suggest that absorption in a narrative, and response to characters in a narrative, should enhance persuasive effects and suppress counterarguing if the implicit persuasive content is counterattitudinal. Also, persuasion mediators and moderators such as topic involvement should be reduced in importance. Evidence in support of these propositions are reviewed in this article. Research needed to extend application of these findings to entertainment-education contexts, to further develop theory in the area of persuasion and narrative, and to better account for other persuasive effects of entertainment narrative, such as those hypothesized in cultivation theory, are discussed.