M.C. Green and T.C. Brock, ‘The Role of Transportation in the Persuasiveness of Public Narratives’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79 (2000), 701-721.

In this post I would like to focus on one way in which literature might change the way we think, a phrase resonating from a recent post. In this essay Green and Brock are advancing ‘transportation theory’, which proposes that when readers or listeners are immersed in a story, their attitudes change in accordance with that story. In this article, they describe various experiments designed to show that greater immersion leads to a larger and more lasting effect on beliefs.

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The story in question need not be a fiction. Indeed, one of the experiments they carried out assessed whether or not there was any difference to the immersion / belief change dynamic, depending on whether a story was fictional or not. It seems that there is no difference: the participants had their beliefs affected the same amount whether the story (which was about the gruesome murder of a girl in a shopping mall) was presented as a short story or as a newspaper article
      I first heard about this experiment from Anna Ichino and Greg Currie. They have posted about their interest in this aspect of the field on the ‘Imperfect Cognitions’ blog; you can read the page here. My main response was considerable consternation as to whether the difference in presentation, the same text offered as fiction or non-fiction, was really testing these two categories properly. If a reader thinks what they are reading is a fiction (or not), is that sufficient? Something in my soul, or my mind, thought not, but I found it difficult to come up with clear-cut satisfactory alternative definitions (whether or not the writer intended one or the other; whether or not the facts depicted are verifiable in the real world) which did not have their own problems.

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Anyway, this essay represents an attempt to explore ways in which literature (or immersive stories, anyway) changes the way we think. It is much narrower than Michael Mack’s book, featured in that earlier post. Where Mack looked to literature for an approach to a changing world, Green and Brock are interested in whether, for example, one’s attitude to the punishment is affected by reading stories about victims of crime. Their approach is much narrower, but reassuringly tangible.

Posts will come a bit more slowly over the next month.