Overcoming Resistance Through Narratives: Findings from a Meta-Analytic Review

By Chelsea L. Ratcliff, Ye Sun. Human Communication Research, 2020

143 citations recorded by the source corpus.

To understand the mechanisms underlying narrative persuasion, a growing body of theoretical and empirical work suggests that narratives reduce audience resistance, possibly via narrative engagement. To synthesize this research, we performed a two-part meta-analysis using three-level random-effects models. Part I focused on experimental studies that directly compared narratives and non-narratives on resistance. Based on 15 effect sizes from nine experimental studies, the overall effect size was d = −.213 (equivalent r = −.107; p < .001), suggesting that narratives generated less resistance than non-narratives. Part II was a synthesis of studies of the relationship between narrative engagement and resistance, consisting of 63 effect sizes from 25 studies. Narrative engagement and resistance were negatively correlated (r = −.131; p < .001), and this relationship was moderated by narrative message characteristics, including genre, length, medium, and character unit. Implications of our findings and directions for future research are discussed.

Subfields: Communication, Gender Studies, Literature and Literary Theory

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/334aadaefefaa7ef9c98396e704f29135014eb28