Seeing is believing: The role of imagery fluency in narrative persuasion through a graphic novel.

Abstract

Compared with other entertainment-education formats, graphic novels and comics offer a number of practical advantages, but the role of graphics in narrative persuasion processes has received little scholarly attention. To examine the potential of graphic stories to facilitate narrative persuasion by enhancing imagery fluency, 212 Amazon Mechanical Turk participants were randomly assigned to read a story about people with schizophrenia formatted for a graphic novel, either with or without images. The results showed that exposure to illustrations increased imagery fluency, leading to narrative engagement and ultimately less counterarguing against a sympathetic, positive portrayal of schizophrenia. The effect of exposure to the illustration on story-consistent belief through imagery fluency was the most substantial indirect effect in the model. This research suggests that there could be a unique effect of media-provided images on narrative engagement and persuasion generally, and it underscores the usefulness of graphic novels as entertainment-education devices. Public Policy Relevance StatementIt is well known that stories are an effective way to package educational messages, but research continues to explore the characteristics of narratives that make them more or less influential. Comparing the effects of a story that included images with a story without images on readers' attitudes about one of the messages in the narrative, this study finds some evidence suggesting that imagery fluency-the ease with which a story allows people to form mental images-is one factor that can make educational stories more cogent.

Narratives are Persuasive Because They are Easier to Understand: Examining Processing Fluency as a Mechanism of Narrative Persuasion

“…Later research should explore how presentation mode might amplify or mitigate the relationships observed in this study. Despite these limitations, our study adds evidence to the small but growing body of literature (Vaughn et al, 2010;Cohen et al, 2018;Walter et al, 2020) investigating the role of processing fluency in narrative persuasion.…”

“…Here, we join a growing number of narrative scholars (Vaughn et al, 2010;Cohen et al, 2018;Walter et al, 2020) in arguing that narrative persuasion might be explainable via a psychological mechanism called processing fluency (for reviews, see Schwarz, 2010b;Schwarz, 2015). Briefly, processing fluency refers to subjective feelings of ease or difficulty that occur while processing new information (Schwarz, 2010a).…”

“…Because processing fluency is also associated with subjective feelings of ease and positive affective responses (Petty et al, 2007), it is possible that these effects could be explainable through fluency. Although some previous work has connected processing fluency to narrative persuasion (Vaughn et al, 2010;Cohen et al, 2018), only one study has formally tested processing fluency as a mechanism of narratives' persuasive effects. Walter et al (2020) demonstrate that processing fluency can influence narrative persuasion by either overcoming topic ambivalence or reducing certainty during motivated processing.…”

Jahrbuch der berufs- und wirtschaftspädagogischen Forschung 2022

“…In der Ausbildung medizinischen Personals werden GN beispielsweise eingesetzt, um das Erlernen von Anatomiewissen zu erleichtern (Chung et al 2020) oder nötiges Wissen für Operationen in moderner Form aufzubereiten (Babaian & Chalian 2014). Auch der Aufbau von Empathie für Menschen mit Krankheiten wie Schizophrenie werden in diesem Kontext in Form von GN thematisiert (Cohen et al 2020). Ein weiteres medizinisches Feld ist die Patientenaufklärung über Behandlungsmethoden.…”

Learning from comics versus non-comics material in education: Systematic review and meta-analysis

“…The lack of consensus in the findings of studies that have investigated the effectiveness of comics when it comes to learning could be attributed to various differences in the experimental procedures. These differences include the target educational fields of STEM (e.g., Wiseman et al, 2021;Shimazaki et al, 2021;Freedman et al, 2022) versus non-STEM (e.g., Cohen et al, 2020;Istiq'faroh et al, 2020;Owens et al, 2020), or target population of students (e.g., Lin et al, 2016;Damopolii et al, 2021) versus the public (e.g., Rodriguez et al, 2016;Shimazaki et al, 2021;Wiseman et al, 2021). The media comparisons also differ between text (e.g., Leiner et al, 2018), animation (e.g., Walsh et al, 2021), or video (e.g.., Kolberg et al, 2021).…”