Argument Strength and the Persuasiveness of Stories

Abstract

Stories are a powerful means to change people’s attitudes and beliefs. The aim of the current work was to shed light on the role of argument strength (argument quality) in narrative persuasion. The present study examined the influence of strong versus weak arguments on attitudes in a low or high narrative context. Moreover, baseline attitudes, interindividual differences in working memory capacity, and recipients’ transportation were examined. Stories with strong arguments were more persuasive than stories with weak arguments. This main effect was qualified by a two-way interaction with baseline attitude, revealing that argument strength had a greater impact on individuals who initially were particularly doubtful toward the story claim. Furthermore, we identified a three-way interaction showing that argument strength mattered most for recipients who were deeply transported into the story world in stories that followed a typical narrative structure. These findings provide an important specification of narrative persuasion theory.

“These Are Just Stories, Mulder”: Exposure to Conspiracist Fiction Does Not Produce Narrative Persuasion

“…While traditional approaches to persuasion give importance to the processing of arguments in the attitude change process (e.g., Petty and Cacioppo, 1986 ), models of narrative persuasion devote much less attention to this aspect, for they tend to consider that transportation, or narrative engagement, is the primary vehicle of persuasion when it comes to stories. Our study, like Schreiner et al ( 2018 ), highlights the interest of developing an approach of narrative persuasion that takes into account the arguments that explicitly or implicitly support the beliefs and attitudes that are depicted in the narrative.…”

“…According to the TIM, the strength of arguments plays a minor role in the narrative persuasion process, for the processing of arguments requires working memory resources that people enjoying a narrative momentarily lack (Green and Brock, 2002 ). However, it has been recently suggested that narratives that included strong arguments about a topic were more persuasive than narratives that included weak arguments, particularly when subjects were initially skeptical about the point advocated in the stories (Schreiner et al, 2018 ). Since CTs are controversial in nature, the last point may be particularly important to understand our results: when a persuasive message is likely to generate skepticism in the narrative recipients, embedding strong arguments in the narrative may be a necessary precondition for persuasion to occur.…”

“…Specifically, examining how such narratives develop implicit and explicit arguments supporting their conspiratorial content is a research topic that would be worth investigating further. Such an approach would constitute a substantial contribution to both narrative persuasion research, which has up to recently neglected the potential role of argumentation in the narrative persuasion process (Schreiner et al, 2018 ), and research on CTs, which have scarcely investigated the question of arguments supporting CTs.…”

Actual Reputation Technology of Individual Entrepreneurs: Personal Branding in Social Networks

“…The exception is texts-narrations. On the one hand, C. Schreiner, M. Appel, M.-B Isberner, and T. Richter investigated how the inclusion of verbalized (rational) arguments in narrative affect the degree of its persuasiveness, and concluded that argument strength used in narration increases persuasiveness of the entire text [9]. On the other hand, any narrative is structured to make the reader experience emotional evolution.…”

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“…увязывания действий и их результатов (Kendeou et al, 2013), что важно для принятия решений. Эксперименты подтверждают высокую степень убедительности нарративов (Nabi & Green, 2015;Braddock & Dillard, 2016;Schreiner et al, 2018), хотя наибольшая убедительность достигается при сочетании нарративов с количественной, числовой информацией (Zebregs et al, 2015;Hornikx, 2018).…”