Doctoral Dissertation Research in DRMS: Incorporating Psychological Distance Framing in Narrative Persuasion

Scientists often use numbers and statistics to communicate health and environmental risks with the public. Members of the public, however, may find this type of messaging difficult to understand or unappealing. In contrast, narrative or stories may offer an effective alternative.

When reading a well-crafted narrative, people may find themselves absorbed into an imaginary world and identify with the characters portrayed. These processes, termed as transportation and identification, illustrate how narratives may change people’s attitudes and behaviors. Notably, when people are engaged in a narrative, they may feel closer to the characters or the scenario, which may also influence their perception about the issue featured in the story.

This research project examines whether narratives indeed reduce the distance people perceive toward the characters and the scenario and subsequently influence their attitudes toward two risk topics – ocean plastic pollution and e-cigarette use. Specifically, participants will read a narrative that features either a close scenario (e.g., ocean plastic pollution harming their own country) or a far scenario (e.g., ocean plastic pollution harming a foreign country), and portrays characters that are either similar or different from them.

We then examine whether these differences in the narrative influence their transportation and identification levels, and more importantly, whether they report attitude changes that are consistent with the positions promoted in the narrative. This project will help risk communication experts craft narrative persuasion messages to target different individuals more effectively.

This research project seeks to advance the theorization of narrative persuasion in risk communication through the lens of psychological distance. There are two main objectives. First, this research explores how using narrative can influence risk communication outcomes.

The central argument is that via the mediation of transportation and identification, the effectiveness of narrative persuasion is influenced by the perceived distance between audience and the risk featured in the narrative. Second, the research aims to incorporate distance framing into narrative message design to effectively communicate about abstract and uncertain risks.

Specifically, this research seeks to identify the impacts of distance cues associated with narrative character and narrative scenario in actualizing persuasion effects. The two experiments feature different character-based and scenario-based distance cues. The experiments focus on one environmental risk – ocean plastic pollution, and one health risk – e-cigarette use.

Intrinsic to public perception of these two topics are all four dimensions of psychological distance – social, spatial, temporal, and hypothetical. By testing the proposed theoretical framework in different environmental and health contexts, this research has broad theoretical and practical implications. Findings from this project contribute to the literature on narrative persuasion and risk communication and inform the design of narrative messaging that is widely utilized in information campaigns and entertainment education.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.