To provide a causal test of identification as a mechanism of narrative persuasion, this study uses the perspective from which a story is told to manipulate identification experimentally and test effects on attitudes. In experiment 1, 120 participants read a story that was told either from the perspective of one character or another character, with both characters having opposing goals. Results showed that perspective influenced identification and story consistency of attitudes. Moreover, identification with one of the characters mediated the effect of perspective on attitudes. In experiment 2, 200 participants read a different story that was told from one of two perspectives, with both characters having opposing opinions. Results showed that identification with both characters mediated the effect of perspective on attitudes. The results of these experiments indicate that identification can be a mechanism of narrative persuasion.

Although "evidence" is often used as an important argument in persuasive health campaigns, it remains unclear what type of evidence has the strongest impact on particular outcome variables. We conducted a meta-analysis in which the effects of statistical and narrative evidence on beliefs, attitude, and intention were separately compared. Statistical evidence was found to have a stronger influence than narrative evidence on beliefs and attitude, whereas narrative evidence had a stronger influence on intention. We explain these findings in terms of the match between the specific characteristics of the two types of evidence and those of the outcome variables. Statistical evidence, beliefs, and attitude all relate primarily to cognitive responses, whereas both narrative evidence and intention relate more specifically to affective responses. We conclude that communication professionals developing health campaigns should match the type of evidence to the main communication objectives.

This study tests whether the adaptation of a narrative's protagonist to be similar to readers increases narrative effects in the health domain. A between-subjects (N = 220) experiment was conducted that varied the similarity of the protagonist to the participants. Results showed that participants who read the version with a similar protagonist perceived themselves to be more at risk of the disease with which the protagonist was diagnosed and felt more efficacy to deal with the symptoms of this disease, than participants who read the version with a dissimilar protagonist. These effects were mediated by self-referencing, indicating that adaptation of a protagonist to be similar to readers makes readers relate the story to themselves, which in turn increases narrative impact.

In recent years, many studies have been conducted on persuasive effects of narratives in a health context. A striking feature of this research area is the diversity of the narratives that are used in the various studies. Narratives that convey a health message differ widely on a large number of dimensions related to the content, form and context. We expect that these characteristics are potential explanatory factors in the effectiveness of the narratives. To provide an overview of the different characteristics of narratives in health effects research and of the persuasive effects that were found, we review 153 experimental studies on health-related narrative persuasion with a focus on the narrative stimuli. The results show that: a) with regard to the content, showing the healthy behavior in a narrative (as opposed to the unhealthy behavior with negative consequences) may be associated with effects on intention. Narratives that contain high emotional content are more often shown to have effects. b) With regard to the form, for print narratives, a first-person perspective is a promising characteristic in light of effectiveness. c) With regard to the context, an overtly persuasive presentation format does not seem to inhibit narrative persuasion. And d) other characteristics, like character similarity or the presentation medium of the narrative, do not seem to be promising characteristics for producing health effects. In addition, fruitful areas for further research can be found in the familiarity of the setting and the way a health message is embedded in the narrative. Because of the diversity of narrative characteristics and effects that were found, continued research effort is warranted on which characteristics lead to effects. The present review provides an overview of the evidence for persuasive narrative characteristics so far.

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