Transportation theory (psychology)

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Narrative transportation theory proposes that when people lose themselves in a story, their attitudes and intentions change to reflect that story. The mental state of narrative transportation can explain the persuasive effect of stories on people, who may experience narrative transportation when certain contextual and personal preconditions are met, as Green and Brock [1] postulate for the transportation-imagery model. As Van Laer, de Ruyter, Visconti, and Wetzels [2] elaborate further, narrative transportation occurs whenever the story receiver experiences a feeling of entering a world evoked by the narrative because of empathy for the story characters and imagination of the story plot.

Contents

Defining the field

Deighton, Romer, and McQueen [3] :335 anticipate the construct of narrative transportation by arguing that a story invites story receivers into the action it portrays and, as a result, makes them lose themselves in the story. [4] Gerrig [5] was the first to coin the notion of narrative transportation within the context of novels. Using travel as a metaphor for reading, he conceptualizes narrative transportation as a state of detachment from the world of origin that the story receiver—in his words, the traveler—experiences because of his or her engrossment in the story, a condition that Green and Brock [6] later describe as the story receiver's experience of being carried away by the story. Notably, the state of narrative transportation makes the world of origin partially inaccessible to the story receiver, thus marking a clear separation in terms of here/there and now/before, or narrative world/world of origin.

Relevant features

Most research on narrative transportation follows the original definition of the construct. Scholars in the field constantly reaffirm the relevance of three features.

  1. Narrative transportation requires that people process stories—the acts of receiving and interpreting.
  2. Story receivers become transported through two main components: empathy and mental imagery. Empathy implies that story receivers try to understand the experience of a story character, that is, to know and feel the world in the same way. Thus, empathy offers an explanation for the state of detachment from the world of origin that is narrative transportation. In mental imagery, story receivers generate vivid images of the story plot, such that they feel as though they are experiencing the events themselves.
  3. When transported, story receivers lose track of reality in a physiological sense.

In accordance with these features, Van Laer et al. [2] :799 define narrative transportation as the extent to which

  1. an individual empathizes with the story characters and
  2. the story plot activates his or her imagination,

which leads him or her to experience suspended reality during story reception.

Similar constructs

Narrative transportation is a form of experiential response to narratives and thus is similar to other constructs, such as absorption, narrative involvement, [7] identification, [8] optimal experience or flow, and immersion. Yet several subtle, critical differences exist. Absorption refers to a personality trait or general tendency to be immersed in life experiences; transportation is an engrossing temporary experience. Flow is a more general construct (i.e., people can experience flow in a variety of activities), whereas transportation specifically entails empathy and mental imagery, which do not occur in flow experiences. Phillips and McQuarrie [9] demonstrate that immersion is primarily an experiential response to aesthetic and visual elements of images, whereas narrative transportation relies on a story with plot and characters, features that are not present in immersion. Identification emphasizes the involvement with story characters, while narrative transportation is concerned with the involvement with the narrative as a whole. [7]

Narrative persuasion

Since narrative transportation's conceptualization, research has demonstrated that the transported "traveler" can return changed by the journey. Subsequent studies have confirmed that a story can engross the story receiver in a transformational experience, whose effects are strong and long-lasting. The transformation that narrative transportation achieves is persuasion of the story receiver. More specifically, Van Laer et al.'s [2] literature review reveals that narrative transportation can cause affective and cognitive responses, beliefs, and attitude and intention changes. However, the processing pattern of narrative transportation is markedly different from that in well-established models of persuasion.

A 2016 meta-analysis found significant, positive narrative persuasion (i.e., narrative-consistent) effects for attitudes, beliefs, intentions and behaviors. [10]

Rival models

Before 2000, dual-process models of persuasion, especially the elaboration likelihood model and heuristic-systematic model, dominated persuasion research. These models attempt to explain why people accept or reject message claims. According to these models, the determination of a claim's acceptability can result from careful evaluation of the arguments presented or from reliance on superficial cues, such as the presence of an expert. Whether receivers scrutinize a message depends on the extent to which they are able and motivated to process it systematically. As important variables, these models include empathy, familiarity, involvement, and the number and nature of thoughts the message evokes. If these variables are mainly positive, the receiver's attitudes and intentions tend to be more positive; if the variables are predominantly negative, the resulting attitudes and intentions are more negative. These variables also exist in narrative persuasion.

Differences between analytical and narrative persuasion

Analytical persuasion and narrative persuasion differ depending on the role of involvement. In analytical persuasion, involvement depends on the extent to which the message has personally relevant consequences for a receiver's money, time, or other resources. If these consequences are sufficiently severe, receivers evaluate the arguments carefully and generate thoughts related to the arguments. Yet, as Slater [11] :171 notes, even though severe consequences for stories are relatively rare, "viewers or readers of an entertainment narrative typically appear to be far more engrossed in the message." This type of involvement, or narrative transportation, is arguably the crucial determinant of narrative persuasion.

Though the dual-process models provide a valid description of analytical persuasion, they do not encompass narrative persuasion. Analytical persuasion refers to attitudes and intentions developed from processing messages that are overtly persuasive, such as most lessons in science books, news reports, and speeches. However, narrative persuasion refers to attitudes and intentions developed from processing narrative messages that are not overtly persuasive, such as novels, movies, or video games. Addressing the strength and duration of the persuasive effects of processing stories, narrative transportation is a mental state that produces enduring persuasive effects without careful evaluation of arguments. Transported story receivers are engrossed in a story in a way that neither is inherently critical nor involves great scrutiny.

Sleeper effect

Narrative transportation seems to be more unintentionally affective than intentionally cognitive in nature. This way of processing leads to potentially increasing and long-lasting persuasive effects. Appel and Richter [12] :128 use the term "Sleeper effect" to describe this paradoxical property of narrative transportation over time, which consists of a more pronounced change in attitudes and intentions and a greater certainty that these attitudes and intentions are correct.

Plausible explanations for the sleeper effect are twofold.

  1. According to poststructural research, language's articulation in narrative format is capable not only of mirroring reality but also of constructing it. As such, stories could cause profound and durable persuasion of the transported story receiver as a result of his or her progressive internalization. When stories transport story receivers, not only do they present a narrative world but, by reframing the story receiver's language, they also durably change the world to which the story receiver returns after the transportation experience.
  2. Research demonstrates that people analyze and retain stories differently from other information formats. For example, Deighton et al. [3] show that analytical advertisements stimulate cognitive responses whereas narrative advertisements are more likely to stimulate affective responses.

Following this line of reasoning, Van Laer et al. [2] :801 define narrative persuasion as

the effect of narrative transportation, which manifests itself in story receivers' affective and cognitive responses, beliefs, attitudes, and intentions from being swept away by a story and transported into a narrative world that modifies their perception of their world of origin.

The conceptual distinction between analytical persuasion and narrative persuasion and the theoretical framework of sound interpretation of narrative persuasion both ground the extended transportation-imagery model (ETIM).

Moderators

ETIM contains three methodological factors that moderate the overall effect of narrative transportation, as van Laer, Feiereisen, and Visconti [13] detail. The narrative transportation effect is stronger

  1. for stories in the commercial (vs. non-commercial) domain,
  2. for stories by users (vs. professionals), and
  3. for stories received alone (vs. with others).

See also

Related Research Articles

Persuasion Umbrella term of influence and mode of communication

Persuasion or persuasion arts is an umbrella term of influence. Persuasion can attempt to influence a person's beliefs, attitudes, intentions, motivations, or behaviors.

Appeal to emotion or argumentum ad passiones is a logical fallacy characterized by the manipulation of the recipient's emotions in order to win an argument, especially in the absence of factual evidence. This kind of appeal to emotion is a type of red herring and encompasses several logical fallacies, including appeal to consequences, appeal to fear, appeal to flattery, appeal to pity, appeal to ridicule, appeal to spite, and wishful thinking.

In psychology, attitude is a psychological construct, a mental and emotional entity that inheres in, or characterizes a person. They are complex and are an acquired state through experiences. It is an individual's predisposed state of mind regarding a value and it is precipitated through a responsive expression towards oneself, a person, place, thing, or event which in turn influences the individual's thought and action. Prominent psychologist Gordon Allport described this latent psychological construct as "the most distinctive and indispensable concept in contemporary social psychology." Attitude can be formed from a person's past and present. Key topics in the study of attitudes include attitude strength, attitude change, consumer behavior, and attitude-behavior relationships.

Carl Iver Hovland was a psychologist working primarily at Yale University and for the US Army during World War II who studied attitude change and persuasion. He first reported the sleeper effect after studying the effects of the Frank Capra's propaganda film Why We Fight on soldiers in the Army. In later studies on this subject, Hovland collaborated with Irving Janis who would later become famous for his theory of groupthink. Hovland also developed social judgment theory of attitude change. Carl Hovland thought that the ability of someone to resist persuasion by a certain group depended on your degree of belonging to the group.

Sleeper effect

The sleeper effect is a psychological phenomenon that relates to persuasion. It is a delayed increase of the effect of a message that is accompanied by a discounting cue.

Narrativity is the extent to which a media tells a story, which is a storyteller's account of an event or a sequence of events leading to a transition from an initial state to a later state or outcome. There are four theoretical foundations of narrativity, represented by the notions of

  1. narrative content,
  2. narrative discourse,
  3. narrative transportation, and
  4. narrative persuasion.

Social judgment theory (SJT) is a self-persuasion theory proposed by Carolyn Sherif, Muzafer Sherif, and Carl Hovland, defined by Sherif and Sherif as the perception and evaluation of an idea by comparing it with current attitudes. According to this theory, an individual weighs every new idea, comparing it with the individual's present point of view to determine where it should be placed on the attitude scale in an individual's mind. SJT is the subconscious sorting out of ideas that occurs at the instant of perception.

Attitudes are associated beliefs and behaviors towards some object. They are not stable, and because of the communication and behavior of other people, are subject to change by social influences, as well as by the individual's motivation to maintain cognitive consistency when cognitive dissonance occurs—when two attitudes or attitude and behavior conflict. Attitudes and attitude objects are functions of affective and cognitive components. It has been suggested that the inter-structural composition of an associative network can be altered by the activation of a single node. Thus, by activating an affective or emotional node, attitude change may be possible, though affective and cognitive components tend to be intertwined.

Elaboration likelihood model

The elaboration likelihood model (ELM) of persuasion is a dual process theory describing the change of attitudes. The ELM was developed by Richard E. Petty and John Cacioppo in 1980. The model aims to explain different ways of processing stimuli, why they are used, and their outcomes on attitude change. The ELM proposes two major routes to persuasion: the central route and the peripheral route.

Behavioural change theories are attempts to explain why behaviours change. These theories cite environmental, personal, and behavioural characteristics as the major factors in behavioural determination. In recent years, there has been increased interest in the application of these theories in the areas of health, education, criminology, energy and international development with the hope that understanding behavioural change will improve the services offered in these areas. Some scholars have recently introduced a distinction between models of behavior and theories of change. Whereas models of behavior are more diagnostic and geared towards understanding the psychological factors that explain or predict a specific behavior, theories of change are more process-oriented and generally aimed at changing a given behavior. Thus, from this perspective, understanding and changing behavior are two separate but complementary lines of scientific investigation.

Language expectancy theory (LET) is a theory of persuasion. The theory assumes language is a rules-based system, in which people develop expected norms as to appropriate language usage in given situations. Furthermore, unexpected linguistic usage can affect the receiver's behavior resulting from attitudes towards a persuasive message.

Fear appeal is a term used in psychology, sociology and marketing. It generally describes a strategy for motivating people to take a particular action, endorse a particular policy, or buy a particular product, by arousing fear. A well-known example in television advertising was a commercial employing the musical jingle: "Never pick up a stranger, pick up Prestone anti-freeze." This was accompanied by images of shadowy strangers (hitchhikers) who would presumably do one harm if picked up. The commercial's main appeal was not to the positive features of Prestone anti-freeze, but to the fear of what a "strange" brand might do.

Inoculation theory is a social psychological/communication theory that explains how an attitude or belief can be protected against persuasion or influence in much the same way a body can be protected against disease–for example, through pre-exposure to weakened versions of a stronger, future threat. The theory uses medical inoculation as its explanatory analogy—applied to attitudes rather than to a disease. It has great potential for building public resilience ('immunity') against misinformation and fake news, for example, in tackling science denialism, risky health behaviours, and emotionally manipulative marketing and political messaging.

The heuristic-systematic model of information processing (HSM) is a widely recognized model by Shelly Chaiken that attempts to explain how people receive and process persuasive messages. The model states that individuals can process messages in one of two ways: heuristically or systematically. Whereas systematic processing entails careful and deliberative processing of a message, heuristic processing entails the use of simplifying decision rules or ‘heuristics’ to quickly assess the message content. The guiding belief with this model is that individuals are more apt to minimize their use of cognitive resources, thus affecting the intake and processing of messages. HSM predicts that processing type will influence the extent to which a person is persuaded or exhibits lasting attitude change. HSM is quite similar to the elaboration likelihood model, or ELM. Both models were predominantly developed in the early to mid-1980s and share many of the same concepts and ideas.

In social psychology, the Yale attitude change approach is the study of the conditions under which people are most likely to change their attitudes in response to persuasive messages. This approach to persuasive communications was first studied by Carl Hovland and his colleagues at Yale University. The basic model of this approach can be described as "who said what to whom": the source of the communication, the nature of the communication and the nature of the audience. According to this approach, many factors affect each component of a persuasive communication. The credibility and attractiveness of the communicator (source), the quality and sincerity of the message, and the attention, intelligence and age of the audience can influence an audience's attitude change with a persuasive communication. Independent variables include the source, message, medium and audience, with the dependent variable the effect of the persuasion.

In social psychology, the boomerang effect refers to the unintended consequences of an attempt to persuade resulting in the adoption of an opposing position instead. It is sometimes also referred to "the theory of psychological reactance", stating that attempts to restrict a person's freedom often produce an "anticonformity boomerang effect".

The cognitive response model of persuasion locates the most direct cause of persuasion in the self-talk of the persuasion target, rather than the content of the message.

Self-Persuasion is used to explain one aspect of social influence. This theory postulates that the receiver takes an active role in persuading himself or herself to change his or her attitude or behavior. Unlike the direct technique of Persuasion, Self-persuasion is indirect and entails placing people in situations where they are motivated to persuade themselves to change. More specifically what characterizes a self-persuasion situation is that no direct attempt is made to convince anyone of anything. Thus, with self-persuasion, people are convinced that the motivation for change has come from within, so the persuasion factors of another person's influence is irrelevant. Therefore, Self-persuasion is almost always a more powerful form of persuasion than the more traditional persuasion techniques. Self-Persuasion, also has an important influence in Social judgment theory, Elaboration Likelihood Model, Cognitive Dissonance and Narrative paradigm.

Behavioural design

Behavioural design is a sub-category of design, which is concerned with how design can shape, or be used to influence human behaviour. All approaches of design for behaviour change acknowledge that artefacts have an important influence on human behaviour and/or behavioural decisions. They strongly draw on theories of behavioural change, including the division into personal, behavioural, and environmental characteristics as drivers for behaviour change. Areas in which design for behaviour change has been most commonly applied include health and wellbeing, sustainability, safety and social context, as well as crime prevention.

Dolores Albarracin

Dolores Albarracin is a psychologist, author and professor of psychology and business based in Illinois. She is Professor of Psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. She is known for her work in the fields of behavior, communication and persuasion. Her contributions have had implications for the scientific understanding of basic social psychological processes and communication policy, especially in the area of health.

References

  1. ↑ Green, M. C., & Brock, T. C. (2002). "In the mind's eye: Transportation-imagery model of narrative persuasion." In M. C. Green, J. J. Strange & T. C. Brock (Eds.), Narrative impact: Social and cognitive foundations. (pp. 315-341). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
  2. 1 2 3 4 van Laer, T., de Ruyter, K., Visconti, L. M., & Wetzels, M. (2014). "The Extended Transportation-Imagery Model: A meta-analysis of the antecedents and consequences of consumers' narrative transportation." Journal of Consumer Research, 40(5), 797-817. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2033192 or doi: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/673383
  3. 1 2 Deighton, J., Romer, D., & McQueen, J. (1989). "Using drama to persuade." Journal of Consumer Research, 16(3), 335-343.
  4. ↑ Nell, V. (1988). Lost in a book: The psychology of reading for pleasure. New Haven, CT: Yale University.
  5. ↑ Gerrig, R. J. (1993). Experiencing narrative worlds: On the psychological activities of reading. New Haven, CT: Yale.
  6. ↑ Green, M. C., & Brock, T. C. (2000). "The role of transportation in the persuasiveness of public narratives." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79(5), 701-721.
  7. 1 2 Murphy, Sheila; Frank, Lauren; Chatterjee, Joyee; Baezconde-Garbanati, Lourdes (2013). "Narrative versus Non-narrative: The Role of Identification, Transportation and Emotion in Reducing Health Disparities". Journal of Communication. 63 (1): 116–137. doi:10.1111/jcom.12007. PMC   3857102 . PMID   24347679.
  8. ↑ Cohen, Jonathan (2001). "Defining identification: A theoretical look at the identification of audiences with media characters". Mass Communication & Society. 4 (3): 245–264. doi:10.1207/S15327825MCS0403_01.
  9. ↑ Phillips, B. J. and E. F. McQuarrie (2010). "Narrative and persuasion in fashion advertising." Journal of Consumer Research 37(3), 368-392.
  10. ↑ Braddock, Kurt; Dillard, James Price (25 February 2016). "Meta-analytic evidence for the persuasive effect of narratives on beliefs, attitudes, intentions, and behaviors". Communication Monographs. 83 (4): 446–467. doi:10.1080/03637751.2015.1128555.
  11. ↑ Slater, M. D. (2002). "Entertainment education and the persuasive impact of narratives." In T. C. Brock, M. C. Green & J. J. Strange (Eds.), Narrative impact: Social and cognitive foundations (pp. 157-181). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
  12. ↑ Appel, M., & Richter, T. (2007). "Persuasive effects of fictional narratives increase over time." Media Psychology, 10(1), 113-134.
  13. ↑ van Laer, T., Feiereisen, S., & Visconti, L. M. "Storytelling in the digital era: A meta-analysis of relevant moderators of the narrative transportation effect." Journal of Business Research, 96(1), 135-146. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3156933 or doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2018.10.053
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