Iowa State University Capstones, Theses and Graduate Theses and Dissertations Dissertations 2017 Don't judge a book by its author: Central and peripheral processing in narrative persuasion Kelly Ann Kane Iowa State University Follow this and additional works at: https://lib.edu/etd Part of the Communication Commons, and the Social Psychology Commons Recommended Citation Kane, Kelly Ann, "Don't judge a book by its author: Central and peripheral processing in narrative persuasion" (2017). Graduate Theses and Dissertations.edu/etd/15335 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Iowa State University Capstones, Theses and Dissertations at Iowa State University Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Graduate Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Iowa State University Digital Repository. For more information, please contact digirep@iastate.
Don't judge a book by its author: Central and peripheral processing in narrative persuasion by Kelly Kane A thesis submitted to the graduate faculty in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF SCIENCE Major: Psychology Program of Study Committee: Kevin Blankenship, Major Professor Kristi Costabile Craig Anderson The student author and the program of study committee are solely responsible for the content of this thesis. The Graduate College will ensure this thesis is globally accessible and will not permit alterations after a degree is conferred. Iowa State University Ames, Iowa 2017 Copyright © Kelly Kane, 2017. All rights reserved.
ii DEDICATION The author would like to dedicate this thesis to all the people who have worked hard to see it completed, most especially Jason Geller. He has provided tireless work in reviewing several drafts, infinite support in matters both statistical and emotional, and willingness to provide endless encouragement. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF FIGURES……………………………………………………………………….v LIST OF TABLES………………………………………………………………………….ix CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………….3 Narrative and Overcoming Resistance…………………………………………….5 Narrative as Argument: Plot and Setting……………………………………………7 Character Identification and Character Exemplars…………………………………11 The Elaboration Likelihood Model…………………………………………………15 The Central Route………………………………………………………….16 The Peripheral Route……………………………………………………….16 Determinants of Elaboration……………………………………………………….18 Ego Involvement……………………………………………………………19 Narrative and the Elaboration Likelihood Model………………………………….25 Pilot Testing of Materials……………………………………………………………26 CHAPTER 2: PRESENT RESEARCH…………………………………………………….28 CHAPTER 3: METHOD……………………………………………………………………33 Participants………………………………………………………………………….37 Dependent Variables…………………………………………………………38 CHAPTER 4: RESULTS…………………………………………………………………….41 Manipulation Checks and Data Cleaning…………………………………………….41 Attitudes as a Function of Narrative Manipulation………………………………….43 Pre-Reading Attitude Measures………………………………………………………46 Post-Reading Attitude Measures…………………………………………………….48 iv Argument Perceptions…………………………………………………….50 Open-Minded Thinking……………………………………………………50 Perceived Elaboration …………………………………………………….50 Cognitive and Affective Bases…………………………………………….52 Perceived Resistance………………………………………………………53 Correlations Between Outcomes………………………………………….54 Exploratory Analysis: Thought-Listing Data…………………………………….54 Exploratory Analysis: Narrative-Specific Measures………………………………58 Exploratory Analysis: Dispositional Measures……………………………………59 Need for Affect and Need for Cognition………………………………….59 Positive and Negative Affect………………………………………………60 CHAPTER 5: DISCUSSION………………………………………………………………61 Attitude Properties………………………………………………………………….65 Limitations in Study Design……………………………………………………….67 Pre-Reading Attitudes………………………………………………………67 Independent Variable Manipulations……………………………………….70 Future Directions……………………………………………………………………70 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………….75 APPENDIX A: STUDY MATERIALS…………………………………………………….86 APPENDIX B: IRB APPROVAL………………………………………………………….114 v LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: Mean Persuasion as a Function of Study Condition………………………………45 Figure 2: Persuasion as a Function of Source by Distraction.46 Figure 3: Argument Perceptions as a Function of Study Condition…………………………49 Figure 4: Unstandardized Regression Coefficients for the Relationship Between Distraction and Post-Reading Opinions as Mediated by Perceived Elaboration.……………52 Figure 5: Unstandardized Regression Coefficients for the Relationship Between Narrative Transportation and Post-Reading Opinions as Mediated by Character Perceptions.…………58 vi LIST OF TABLES Table 1: Descriptive Statistics and Correlations Between Dependent Measures.48 Table 2: Correlations Between Dispositional Measures.59 vii NOMENCLATURE ELM Elaboration Likelihood Model PANAS Positive and Negative Affect OMT Open-Minded Thinking ANOVA Analysis of Variance viii ACKNOWLEGEMENTS I would like to thank my committee chair, Kevin Blankenship (who read and returned dozens of drafts within hours of receiving them), and my committee members, Kristi Costabile and Craig Anderson, for their hard work in making this thesis what it is today. In addition, I would also like to thank Jason Geller, Catharine Kane, Annie Kane, Shuhebur Rahman, Rachel Dianiska, Johnie Allen, and Garrett Hisler, all of whom took the time to read this thesis as it was in preparation in order to provide feedback.
All my gratitude also goes to my friends, colleagues, the department faculty and staff for making my time at Iowa State University a wonderful experience. I want to also offer my appreciation to those who were willing to participate in my surveys and observations, without whom this thesis would not have been possible. ix ABSTRACT According to the Narrative Transportation model of persuasion, narrative persuasion is structurally different from non-narrative persuasion, and therefore not moderated by differences in cognitive elaboration (Green & Brock, 2000). However, narratives also contain aspects of arguments that can be influenced by elaboration—vividness, empathy, and causal structure.
This study tested the hypothesis that an Elaboration Likelihood Model paradigm using a narrative message would produce similar results to those observed in rhetorical persuasion. Participants (N = 478) read a narrative arguing against illegal media use which contained manipulations of both peripheral and message-relevant aspects while completing distraction tasks. While highly distracted participants were more persuaded by the peripheral cue, minimally distracted participants were not. Unexpectedly, the central merit of protagonist representativeness had a main effect on persuasion across distraction conditions.
These findings suggest that narrative persuasion arises partially from the inherent argument strength of narratives, but that narratives may have different patterns of elaborative outcomes than rhetorical messages. INTRODUCTION In 1997, bestselling author Stephen King chose to remove one of his early stories, Rage, from print despite the novella’s financial success. The anthology where Rage previously appeared (The Bachman Books) began to be printed without the short novel, and no new copies of the book have been printed since that date. Why did King make this decision? Since its release, the novel had been linked to no less than four separate incidents in which four different individuals engaged in school shootings, resulting in nine murders.
Rage tells the story of high school student Charlie Decker, who takes his classroom hostage with an assault rifle and murders three teachers. Charlie, the novel’s narrator, is portrayed as an intelligent and sensitive young man who can find no other outlet for his feelings than committing murder. In the subsequent shootings, of the murderers inspired by Rage directly related himself to Charlie Decker: he paraphrased a line from the novel as he pointed a gun at his classmates and later cited Rage as the inspiration for his decision to bring a gun to school (Associated Press, 1988). If this novel could cause murders, King decided, then he should remove all copies from the world.
What exactly gave Rage so much power to inspire extreme actions? The shooters (none of whom had a history of psychosis) presumably knew that the story contained within was a purely imaginative exercise created by an author who only wanted to entertain readers; all copies of the book were sold in the fiction section of bookstores (Associated Press, 1988). The author himself did not set out to argue that killing one’s teachers is a justifiable course of action; King expressed regret and horror that his work of fiction could inspire such atrocities (1997). The novel does not explicitly provide reasons that taking one’s classroom hostage is a moral or fulfilling course of action, and does not suggest that Charlie Decker is a good person for having done so. However, individuals who read Rage nonetheless consciously attempted to emulate its protagonist’s actions.
2 Although most works of fiction do not directly inspire acts of mass murder, they still have the power to change individuals’ attitudes and behaviors, regardless of the author’s intentions. Children who read the Harry Potter novels express greater tolerance of derogated outgroups than children who read a less engaging narrative (Vezzali, Stathi, Giovannini, Capozza, & Trifiletti, 2014). College students who play a version of Call of Duty that portrays Arabic characters as terrorists demonstrate more negative stereotypes in their thoughts about Muslim individuals than students who play a version that features neutral portrayals of Arabic characters (Saleem & Anderson, 2013). There are dozens of other studies which find that narratives in the form of feature-length movies (Iguarta, 2010), short stories (Green, 2004), personal anecdotes (McQueen, Kreuter, Kalesan, & Alcaraz, 2012), short films (Costabile & Terman, 2013), consumer reviews (Hamby, Daniloski, & Brinberg, 2015), video games (Gentile & Gentile, 2007) and radio shows (Zheng, 2014) have the power to induce changes in consumers’ beliefs and behaviors.
The outcomes of narrative persuasion are well-understood; the mechanisms whereby narrative persuasion occurs are not. This research will extend knowledge on the processes whereby narratives influence individuals’ attitudes and behaviors. It will examine whether relatively peripheral cues toward the persuasive power of the narrative (such as anticipated expertise of the author in creating an effective narrative) and central aspects of the same narrative (such as representativeness of the main character for a broader social category) differ in how they influence reader persuasion. In the process, it will examine whether or not it is meaningful to apply the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) of non-narrative (rhetorical) persuasion to an examination of the persuasive outcomes that result from reading narratives.
Furthermore, it will provide insight into whether narrative persuades because it is a form of strong argument in and of itself, because narratives contain concrete information, causal explanatory processing, and character exemplar paradigms. 3 Narrative Persuasion Narrative persuasion is any form of attitude change that occurs through the consumption of fictional narratives. Narrative persuasion elicits its effect via a process known as narrative transportation (Green & Brock, 2000). Narrative transportation is a specific mindset that occurs when a reader becomes so involved in a story that he or she loses track of time, becomes emotionally invested in the plot, and spontaneously generates strong mental images that have to do with the events or objects described in the story (Green & Brock, 2000).
Fictional stories do not typically present explicit arguments in favor of a particular position, and yet they have the power to change readers’ attitudes toward real political issues, individual conflicts, and public policies (van Laer, De Ruyter, Visconti, & Wetzels, 2013). In fact, persuasive communications that use a narrative have greater power to change participants’ attitudes and intentions toward consumer products than equivalent messages that use a rhetorical structure, through reducing individuals’ resistance to arguments they would otherwise find counterattitudinal (Escalas, 2007). Anecdotally, almost all individuals can report having their lives changed by reading at least one fictional story. The study of narrative persuasion is still relatively new.
Green and Brock (2000) conducted the first study that deliberately sought to change attitudes through fiction just over 15 years ago, and although researchers in areas as diverse as health psychology (Banerjee & Greene, 2012), neurology (Zak, 2015), social psychology (Thompson & Haddock, 2011), and marketing (Escalas, 2007) have since continued the investigation into the predictors and consequences of narrative persuasion, the field is still young. Despite the relative newness of the field, narratives are a fundamental aspect of human communication. The annual Nielsen survey of millions of Americans estimates that American adults averaged more than 11 hours of media use per day in 2014, and that more than half of that media use came in the form of radio or television 4 consumption (Richter, 2015). According to this report, more than 50% of content on television is narratively structured, and although most radio content comes in the form of non-narrative news or music, radio advertisements overwhelmingly use narrative formats to sell products (Zheng, 2014).
Furthermore, humans naturally communicate with one another using narratives beyond the structured narratives found in media. Consumers writing product reviews often spontaneously use a narrative format when attempting to persuade fellow shoppers either to use or avoid a particular product (Hamby, Daniloski, & Brinberg, 2015). Lawyers deliberately evoke cultural narratives in the courtroom when trying to persuade jurors to have empathy for defendants; logically sound narratives are far more likely to induce jurors to agree with the lawyer’s side on a particular issue (Sheppard, 2011). Advertisements also use individual customers’ anecdotes about experiences with a product as persuasive communication in order to influence readers’ opinions through use of typical cases to generate empathy for a cause (Escalas, 2007).