Abstract
The narrative mindset is a tendency to interpret social information in the frame of stories. Two experiments were conducted to determine if and why the narrative mindset increases social problem-solving effectivity. The experiments consisted of two parts: the experimental manipulation (inducing the narrative mindset or control condition) and the observation of effects. In the second part, presented as a separate study, a participant was asked to advise other people facing interpersonal problems (experiment 1) or emotional problems (experiment 2). Three pairs of coders judged each piece of advice independently on three scales: Effectivity of the advice, empathy, and personalization (using their own experiences in providing the advice). The results indicate that the narrative mindset increases empathy, supported by the co-occurring increase in the problem’s personalization, which leads to higher effectivity. The results reveal the positive real-life implications of structuring social information within a story frame. It may encourage the introduction of the narrative mindset effects into an area of social cognition research. Finally, the experiments show that the narrative mindset may be activated experimentally, providing an effective instrument to test the impact of narrative knowledge on social cognition.
Highlights
Our study inquires if and why the narrative mindset increases effectivity in social problemsolving
Analyses revealed that the narrative mindset, regardless of the type of a problem, led to higher empathy and personalization of problem, and to the higher effectivity of advice, supporting our basic hypotheses
When analyzed together in a dual-mediation model, the effect of narrative mindset on the effectivity of advice was partly mediated through empathy only and partly through personalization of problem and empathy combined, while the isolated mediation effect of personalization of problem ceased to be significant
Summary
Our study inquires if and why the narrative mindset increases effectivity in social problemsolving. Studies on social problem-solving concern mainly different negative correlates of effectiveness in solving, such as depression [3, 6,7,8,9,10], schizophrenia [5, 11], previous suicide attempts [12], lower social adjustment [2, 13], older age [14,15,16,17,18], weakened episodic memory recall [14, 16], and physical, neurophysiological, and psychiatric impairments and deficiencies such as amnestic mild cognitive impairments [19] and temporal lobe epilepsy [18]. Up to date exploration of situational factors, including mindset, influencing the ability to solve social problems has been relatively scarce.
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