Beyond Personal Responsibility: Examining the Effects of Narrative Engagement on Communicative and Civic Actions

Abstract

Moving beyond personal responsibility-taking behaviors, this paper examines communicative (interpersonal talk and online message sharing) and civic (public policy support and intention to donate) behavioral outcomes in the context of narrative persuasion. A web-based experiment was conducted to test the mediating effects of two narrative engagement constructs, transportation and empathy, on these behavioral outcomes. Participants recruited via Amazon Mechanical Turk (n = 467) participated in an experiment conducted on Qualtrics, where they were randomized to read either a narrative or a nonnarrative message about factors contributing to obesity. The narrative message, compared to the nonnarrative message, generated greater transportation and affective empathy but had no overall advantage regarding behavioral outcomes. Path analyses showed consistent, significant indirect effects via transportation and affective empathy on all the outcome variables: online message sharing, interpersonal talk, public policy support, and intention to donate to a non-profit obesity organization. Our study contributes to the extant narrative research by shedding light on how narrative messages, via engaging the audience, could shape social responses beyond personal responsibility-taking. Implications and limitations of findings were discussed.