Narrative transportation and attitude change

The psychology of audience engagement includes narrative transportation, a model in which readers become immersed in a story through focused attention, emotional engagement, mental imagery, and detachment from reality. Van Laer, de Ruyter, Visconti, and Wetzels describe this immersion as feeling as if one has entered the story's world, driven by empathy for characters and imagination of the plot.

2 articles, 1 video, 1 book · about 19 min of reading and viewing

The reading path

1. Read
   

   The Storytelling Animal · Greater Good Magazine · 3 min read

   Mirror neurons, brain cells that allow people to experience another person's emotions, also fire when people are at the movies, read books, or witness a story character emoting. People who read a lot of fiction tend to have higher empathy and better social skills, probably because of a strengthened mirror neuron response, Keith Oatley and other researchers have found.

2. Read
   the psychology of audience engagement · Wikipedia · 11 min read

   Identification emphasizes involvement with story characters, while narrative transportation concerns involvement with the narrative as a whole, which can shape story receivers' beliefs, attitudes, and intentions. Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) is a model explaining why people accept or reject message claims, by careful analysis or superficial cues such as an expert's presence. In ELM, receivers process information logically, whereas in narrative transportation they process it emotionally, helping explain how stories persuade.

3. Watch
   

   Storytelling: How to keep your audience engaged | Sebastian Junger | Big Think · YouTube · 5 min watch

   Sebastian Junger says every piece of journalism has a narrative arc, which is integral to human storytelling. He describes a journalist as someone willing to disappoint themselves with the truth.

4. Book
   

   Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die · Bookshop.org

   Made to Stick by Chip Heath and Dan Heath describes the anatomy of ideas that stick and ways to make them stickier, including the human scale principle, the Velcro Theory of Memory, and curiosity gaps.

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