Narrative Perspective and Transportation: Exploring Important Conditions in Narrative Persuasion

摘要

In recent decades, challenges of the information age, as the increasing wave of media broadcasts, public misinformation and persuasion knowledge (Lafferty, 1999) as well as evolving extremist movements height in concert the need for an effective social planning of communication (Andrews and Netemeyer, 2015). In view of the emerging entertainment-driven mindset, the story and the associated effects of narrative persuasion has become one of the most significant subjects in research on persuasion (Singhal and Rogers, 2002). One major reason of the growing interest in narratives is the overwhelming power to challenge even most persistent convictions through the perceptual illusion that a mediated experience is not mediated (nonmediation, Lombard and Ditton, 1997; see overview in Dal Cin et al. 2004, Moyer-Guse, 2008). Transportation, as a central element of non-mediation, can be explained as a process, which draws the media user's complete attention to the narrative so that the real world becomes more and more distant (Green and Brock, 2002). Thus, narratives may transport us into exciting new worlds of the story characters and thereby open up new vistas. Particularly fear-inducing stories (Andrews et al., 2014) are identified to be very effective to induce reflections about the reader's self and the reader's social surroundings, since controversial issues, as one essential element 6f the nature of this genre, can be addressed in a straightforward manner (Sparks and Sparks, 2005). Although, they create a