Examining the Co-Occurrence of Engagement and Self-Referencing in the Context of Narrative Persuasion

Abstract

Current theorizing in narrative persuasion demonstrates that stories can be used as a means to shift attitudes, behavioral intentions, and the like, which can be utilized as a form of health communication. Likewise, empirical evidence on self-referencing-a process through which individuals relate environmental stimuli to themselvesdemonstrates that thinking about the self in regards to stimuli such as narratives can make the messages in those stimuli more persuasive. While both of these can occur in response to narratives and can yield positive persuasive outcomes, there is theoretical reason to believe that these two processes cannot co-occur: Engagement is conceptualized as a process through which one loses awareness of themselves, whereas self-referencing is conceptualized as having an awareness of how things in the environment relate to oneself. The primary goal of this study was to determine if these two processes are actually unable to co-occur simultaneously. In addition, differences that may exist in persuasive power between narrative engagement and self-referencing in the context of narratives were unknown. As such, the second goal of this study was to uncover potential differences in how narrative engagement and self-referencing affect persuasive outcomes. Finally, the bulk of research on both narrative engagement and self-referencing tends to focus on these processes as they occur during narrative consumption, but there is mounting evidence that the post-narrative exposure period is important for persuasion as well. Even if individuals cannot self-reference during a narrative, they may be able to do so after. Therefore, the final goal of the current study was to determine to what extent people self-reference after a narrative when they are encouraged to self-reference during a narrative compared to when they are encouraged to be fully engaged with the narrative. Using an episode of the television series Girls that contains a narrative about sexual health, a between-subjects experiment was conducted with 223 undergraduate students that were randomly assigned to one of four conditions: self-referencing directions, narrative engagement directions, mixed directions, and no directions. The narrative engagement manipulation was unsuccessful. However, participants in both the selfreferencing condition and the mixed instructions condition reported engaging in more self-referencing than the other conditions. Participants in these conditions did not report less narrative engagement as a result. This suggests that self-referencing is compatible with narrative engagement. There were no differences in persuasive outcomes between the conditions. Because there was no inclusion of a control stimulus, it is unknown whether the episode was persuasive. Likewise, there were no differences in the amount of counterarguing viewers engaged in between the conditions, indicating that selfreferencing did not prompt defensive processing of the message. Finally, there were no difference in the amount of self-referencing viewers ge...