Narrative Appeals

Abstract

This entry conceptually reviews the definition, moderators, and mechanism of narrative appeals as well as relevant concepts and theories for their health persuasion and behavioral change effects. Narrative transportation (or immersion) is a mechanism through which a narrative influences people's cognition, affect, and behavior. This process promotes the suspension of disbelief as well as the reduction of counterarguments and resistance to persuasion, enables the story experience to become like a personal experience, and creates the player's affective response to narrative characters through processes such as interpersonal attraction, likability, identification, or parasocial interaction. Moderators include the audience's transportability, need for affect, prior knowledge and familiarity as well as narrative quality, co‐viewing, and first‐person perspective. Narratives complement behavioral change theories including the theory of planned behavior, social cognitive theory, and self‐determination theory. A preliminary body of research has verified narrative's behavioral change effect. Once narratives have been developed with the guidance of relevant behavior theories and engaging elements for the audience, they can induce significant behavior change such as objectively measured physical activity. The effect is not simply attributable to the inclusion of additional video, but narrative per se. The development of media technology has created many opportunities for narratives to elicit significant behavior changes. Innovative and rigorous empirical research is needed to enhance our understanding of the mechanism of narrative persuasion and behavior change.