Kurzfassung

Over the past 20 years, narrative persuasion research has established itself as an independent field of research in communication science (Braddock & Dillard, 2016; Früh & Frey, 2014). This body of research focuses on narrative forms of media messages "with an identifiable beginning, middle, and end that provide[.] information about scene, characters, and conflict; raises unanswered questions or unresolved conflict; and provides resolution" (Hinyard & Kreuter, 2007, p. 778). In...Over the past 20 years, narrative persuasion research has established itself as an independent field of research in communication science (Braddock & Dillard, 2016; Früh & Frey, 2014). This body of research focuses on narrative forms of media messages "with an identifiable beginning, middle, and end that provide[.] information about scene, characters, and conflict; raises unanswered questions or unresolved conflict; and provides resolution" (Hinyard & Kreuter, 2007, p. 778). In comparison, non-narrative communication are didactic forms of media messages, such as conventional news formats and strategic messages designed to promote a social or political goal, and non-narrative messages tend to focus on the presentation of facts, arguments, and evidence. Narrative media messages can be found in great diversity in entertainment formats such as films, series or books, journalistic exemplars, and public campaigns, but also in populist propaganda by politically motivated groups.
With its ever-increasing research interest in narrative communication, science is reacting to the remarkable finding that many people are influenced in their judgments, attitudes and behaviours by the manifold forms of narrative media messages. Recent meta-analyses show that narrative media messages can have a stronger persuasive effect than non-narrative forms of communication under many conditions (Braddock & Dillard, 2016; Shen, Sheer, & Li, 2015). In concrete terms, findings in the field of health communication have shown a stronger influence of narratives in comparison to informative media messages on the evaluation of personal health risks (Hye Kim & Niederdeppe, 2016; So & Shen, 2016), on attitudes toward health screening (Braddock & Dillard, 2016; Tukachinsky & Tokunaga, 2013), and on health-promoting behavioural intentions (Hyun Kim, Bigman, Leader, Lerman, & Cappella, 2012; Tukachinsky & Tokunaga, 2013). Narrative media messages have also been shown to be an effective strategy for political communication, addressing problematic and sensitive issues and influencing debates in a desired direction. For example, narrative messages in politics can promote positive attitudes and behavioural intentions towards stigmatised groups of society such as migrants, people with disabilities or those with various forms of mental illness (Caputo & Rouner, 2011; Oliver, Dillard, Bae, & Tamul, 2012; Wong, Lookadoo, & Nisbett, 2017). Against the background of the high presence of narrative formats in the mass media, the persuasive potential of narratives results in a considerable scientific as well as social relevance for research on narrative persuasion.
The vast majority of empirical studies in this field of research investigate short-term persuasive effects of narrative media messages in experimental designs immediately after their reception. Longer-term effects are rarely the subject of empirical testing (e. g. Shaffer et al., 2018; Wang & Singhal, 2016). How persuasive effects develop over time, however, is of great social and scientific interest. For example, communicative interventions targeting health objectives will only be matter for public health outcomes if positive attitudes and behavioral intentions last and result in actual behaviour.
Moreover, the role of prior (counter-) attitudes as a boundary condition of the persuasive effects remains an under-researched aspect in narrative communication. There is a rich body of empirical studies examining the persuasive effects of personal exemplars – the depiction of the personal story of an individual as illustrative case – on the recipients’ attitude change (e. g. Zillmann, 2006; Zillmann & Brosius, 2000). These studies usually compare the effects of such journalistic narratives to traditional (non-narrative) news articles with numerical evidence such as base-rate information or statistics. However, the results are not fully conclusive. While some studies preponderantly support the initial assumption that narrative news have a stronger message-consistent impact on the recipients’ attitudes (Boukes, Boomgaarden, Moorman, & Vreese, 2015; Brosius & Bathelt, 1994; Daschmann, 2000), others find that traditional news are more persuasive (Allen, Preiss, & Gayle, 2006; Baesler & Burgoon, 1994). Prior consistent or inconsistent levels of prior attitudes may explain some of the heterogeneous findings but received little attention in research so far. A few studies have indeed found that prior attitudes moderate the effects of narrative messages in shaping persuasive outcomes, though the conditions under which prior attitudes matter remain poorly understood and under-theorized (Schreiner, Appel, Isberner, & Richter, 2018; Slater, Rouner, & Long, 2006).
Our research project combines both lines of research and sheds light on a research question that has not been addressed in narrative persuasion research so far. FF: Are narrative media messages more effective than non-narrative media messages in affecting prior counter-attitudes from a long-term perspective? In addition, while replication is considered an important part of the research process in social science to gain confidence in our empirical findings, they are rarely conducted in communication science (McEwan, Carpenter, & Westerman, 2018). Moreover, Tiokhin and colleagues (2018) point to the importance to replicate findings across diverse cultural populations to improve the generalizability of the results. Therefore, this research project aims to answer the research question in a cross-cultural context in Germany and the US.
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