Touching Tales for Touchy Topics? Engaging Contentious Issues through Narrative Persuasion

Brooks, John Jennings

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-v59a-3m46

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Touching Tales for Touchy Topics? Engaging Contentious Issues through Narrative Persuasion

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Scholarly inquiry has yielded a wealth of evidence in support of narrative-based strategies for persuasion, and yet support for this approach is less consistent in relation to contentious or controversial issues. To better understand why this might be the case, the first part of this dissertation reports a theoretically-guided content analysis of narrative representations of abortion on U.S. streaming services (N = 136). Following the predictions of social cognitive theory, the extended elaboration likelihood model, and the model of narrative comprehension and engagement, the content analysis offers insight into how the features of these representations might shape the audience’s involvement with the narrative and its characters and subsequently influence their perspective on reproductive rights. Following this analysis, I offer recommendations for how storytellers might better utilize these theories to engage with abortion decision-making in a fashion that maximizes the potential for involvement and minimizes unintended stigma. To test whether these predictions regarding the relationship between narrative/character features and involvement hold true in practice, the content analysis is followed by an experimental study that examines the influence of two key contextual features of abortion narratives. Using a 3 (character disposition) x 2 (consent status) design (N = 438), the study tests the impact of a storyline from the television show 13 Reasons Why. By manipulating both the context of the sexual encounter (a narrative feature) and the affective disposition toward the main character (a character feature), the experiment sought to better understand the role such contextual features play in shaping audience response directly as well as through their influence on identification. The findings indicate a need for caution in presenting controversial issues on screen: a worrying asymmetry emerged, where negative context promoted less favorable attitudes while positive context had no observable effect. Accordingly, abortion depictions could potentially contribute to anti-abortion sentiments if focal characters are not presented sympathetically. In light of the findings from the content analysis and experiment, I conducted an additional experiment utilizing a 2 (anecdotal evidence) x 2 (statistical evidence) design (N = 403) that contrasts narrative and non-narrative approaches to persuasion regarding contentious topics. Specifically, I consider the differential influences of statistical and anecdotal evidence in order to propose a “blended narrative” format that utilizes both forms of evidence to potentially maximize the impact on a broader array of message-consistent outcomes. The study also proposes that individual differences (need for cognition, need for affect, prior attitudes) might play a moderating role in the processing of these messages, in addition to examining whether there are differences in cognitive/emotional evaluations of the messages. The findings further gesture toward the challenges of persuasion when dealing with polarized topics, while also highlighting potential advantages of the blended narrative format that might be explored through future research. Following the presentation of these three studies, the theoretical and practical implications of their findings are discussed.

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