How to make a story work introducing the concept of narrativity into narrative persuasion
There is a substantial body of empirical evidence t hat narrative messages are influential in changing attitudes and beliefs of the audie nc Narratives allow for a specific reading or viewing experience: They transport their recipie nts into the narrative world, involving them cognitively and emotionally. The role of the t ext, 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 th eoretically develop a model of narrative persuasion, the Transportation Imagery Model by Gre en 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 diff rent 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 i n l terature and narratology. This interdisciplinary perspective is useful to deepen the theor etical understanding of many fields in traditional communication research, e.g. news research, cultivation, and entertainment education. Media are full of stories. Entertainment fare in te levision, for instance, mostly consists of narrative formats like feature films and series. Information programs like news or documentaries are often presented as stories as well (s e Gurevitch Kavoori, 1994; Hickethier, 2002; Kiener, 1999; Luginbuhl, Schwab, Burger, 20 04) Similarly, newspapers, magazines and the radio make extensive use of stories (see Be ll, 1999; Berger, 1997; Bird Dardenne, 1990; Link, 1986) Finally, the traditional media f or stories are, of course, books. In general, stories are considered to be close to e veryday life and thinking: ,Stories are habitation. We live in and through stories. They co njure worlds. We do not know the world other than as story world. Stories inform life. The y hold us together and keep us apart" (Mair, 1988, p. 127) Stories may even be regarded as a ba ic communication mode: "Narration is a mode of communication. People tell stories to enter tain, teach, and to learn, to ask for an interpretation and to give one" (Czarniawska, 2004, p 10) Stories are equally ,a mode of reasoning and a mode of representation" (Richardson, 1990, p. 11 8) Creating and understanding narrative is a basic human quality. Humans have an understanding of time that is organized in stories, which separates them from other species (A bbott, 2002) and, according to Fisher (1987) even constitutes a specific model of man the human as a story telling animal This extreme position need not be shared to acknowl edge that stories have always been attributed great potential to affect individua ls in their thinking and acting. The bible is a historic example of stories used to convey values a nd norms, just as folk tales are used for educational purposes. Also, the history of censorsh ip reflects the belief of the authoritarian state and society that stories can influence, or, m ore specifically, harm the audience (see Schutz, 1990) This applies to factual accounts as well as fictitious texts. 1 This paper was presented at the International Comm unication Association Conference in Dresden in June 2006.