How to make a story work : introducing the concept of narrativity into narrative persuasion

Abstract

There is a substantial body of empirical evidence that narrative messages are influential in changing attitudes and beliefs of the audience. Narratives allow for a specific reading or viewing experience: They transport their recipients into the narrative world, involving them cognitively and emotionally. The role of the text, however, generally remains unclear: What attributes make a story interesting, immersive and persuasive? What are the specifics of processing stories? The goal of this paper is to theoretically develop a model of narrative persuasion, the Transportation Imagery Model by Green and Brock (2002) and extend it by integrating the concept of narrativity (Coste, 1989; Prince, 1982; Ryan, 1992). The extended model benefits from the respective strengths of the different disciplines that are merged into one model – the nature of the reader’s experiences from the psychological Transportation Imagery Model, and textual narrativity that roots in literature and narratology. This interdisciplinary perspective is useful to deepen the theoretical understanding of many fields in traditional communication research, e.g. news research, cultivation, and entertainment education. Kinnebrock, Susanne; Bilandzic, Helena