The impact of entertainment-education messages on beliefs, attitudes, and behavior is typically explained in terms of social cognitive theory principles. However, important additional insights regarding reasons why entertainment-education messages have effects can be derived from the processing of persuasive content in narrative messages. Elaboration likelihood approaches suggest that absorption in a narrative, and response to characters in a narrative, should enhance persuasive effects and suppress counterarguing if the implicit persuasive content is counterattitudinal. Also, persuasion mediators and moderators such as topic involvement should be reduced in importance. Evidence in support of these propositions are reviewed in this article. Research needed to extend application of these findings to entertainment-education contexts, to further develop theory in the area of persuasion and narrative, and to better account for other persuasive effects of entertainment narrative, such as those hypothesized in cultivation theory, are discussed.
Although source credibility's importance in communication, particularly in persuasion, is well documented, audience processes in assessing source credibility and the resulting impact are inadequately specified. We hypothesize message quality will have direct effects and mediate partially the effects of initial credibility assessments on subsequent source credibility assessments and on belief change. Also, subsequent credibility assessments are expected to mediate effects of initial credibility assessments and message quality assessments on belief change. Reanalyses of experimental data (N=74) support the hypothesized direct effects and several proposed mediating relationships.
In this experiment, we examine effects of television dramas on support for controversial public policies (gay marriage and the death penalty) and explore mechanisms that may explain such effects. The dramas influenced support for death penalty but not gay marriage. As predicted, exposure to the relevant drama eliminated the relationship between prior ideology (conceptualized as a continuous variable) and death penalty support. Moreover, the valence of the relationship between prior (increasingly liberal) ideology and salience of a relevant value (perceived importance of a safe and crime-free society) went from negative in the comparison condition to positive after exposure to the relevant drama. These and other results suggest that a television narrative can influence policy support by reframing the dramatic situation to reduce the effect of prior ideology and values and by minimizing processing of the story as intentionally persuasive discourse.
This study of persuasion processes in a value-relevant context tests effects of the presence or absence of statistical evidence and the presence or absence of anecdotal evidence, crossed across three base messages regarding different alcohol use issues. Results suggest that a variant of central processing as described by Petty and Cacioppo (1986) was used: Involvement predicted greater message-relevant responses only when the message was congruent with recipients' own values regarding alcohol use. Among recipients for whom the message was value-congruent, messages with statistical evidence were rated more persuasive, more believable, and better written; anecdotal evidence had no effect. Among recipients for whom the message was value-discrepant, messages with anecdotal evidence were rated more persuasive, more believable, and (marginally) better written, and statistical evidence had no effect. Path analyses also suggest that peripheral-processing strategies are employed when the message is value-discrepant, and central-processing strategies are used when the message is value-congruent.
This study examined the narrative effects of familiarity, transportation, whether a story is factual or fiction, and perceived realism on the stigmatizing behavior of social distancing behavior. A sample of N = 137 participants watched a commercial movie about mental illness. Genre was manipulated to determine whether fiction or nonfiction impacted social distancing behavior. Although there was no effect of the genre manipulation, transportation was found to have a relationship with social distancing, with the more relevant the participants found the story, the lower they demonstrated social distancing behavior. How much participants identified with the main character was found to have a partial mediating effect between perceived story relevance and social distancing behavior.
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