"Hey, that could be me": The role of similarity in narrative persuasion.

ABSTRACT: Stories are often used in health communication because of accumulating evidence of their potential to affect people's attitudes and health behavioral intentions. Similarity between the reader and the story's protagonist appears to positively influence narrative persuasion, but the exact role of similarity on persuasive outcomes is debated, as some research finds clear effects of similarity manipulations whereas others do not. Possibly, these mixed results were found because the similarity manipulations were not always relevant to the topic of the story. We conducted an experiment (N = 582) in which we varied the age and gender of the protagonist, features that were of central relevance to the story's topic, namely breast cancer versus testicular cancer. There were two groups of participant

SUBMITTER: Ooms J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6472763 | biostudies-literature | 2019

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature