Stories and Social Understanding: The Roles of Narrativity, Fictionality, and Literariness

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The potential of stories to improve audience members’ social understanding (in terms of mentalizing, empathy/sympathy, schemata, and attitudes) has attracted substantial theoretical and empirical attention. Most researchers in this area discuss the psychological impact of narratives by referring to “literary fiction” or “fictional narratives”, thus conflating narrativity, fictionality, and/or literariness. Empirical research has only begun to address the question which aspects of stories drive their effects: Is the narrative form or the degree of narrativity crucial for stories to have an impact on social understanding? Or is literariness (literary texts vs. genre media) better suited (or even required) to influence social understanding? Does fictionality (non-fiction versus fiction) play a role? The proposed project is meant to gather insight into these three conceptually separate aspects of narrative literary fiction—narrativity, fictionality, and literariness—and examine their distinct roles in fostering social understanding.Our focus in Work Package 1 is on narrativity. We will conduct a meta-analysis to summarize the available experimental evidence for the effects of stories on social understanding, with a focus on the features of the experimental texts that are constitutive for its degree of narrativity (Meta-Analysis 1). We will further conduct a quasi-experimental study (Quasi-Experiment 1) and an experiment (Experiment 2) to examine how textual features tied to narrativity relate to the flow of comprehension, transportation, and empathy/sympathy towards story characters, using naturalistic short stories. In Work Package 2, we will address the role of fictionality, with an emphasis on media choice. Research on the motivated selection of media has demonstrated that people prefer information that is consistent with their attitudes and beliefs and that provides a positive image of the in-group. Given that people are aware of the difference in epistemic status for fictional versus non-fictional stories motivated avoidance should be reduced for stories introduced as fictional. This hypothesis is tested with respect to attitudes and beliefs (Experiment 3) and in-group portrayals (Experiment 4). In Work Package 3, we will examine the relationship of literariness and social understanding. This work package includes a meta-analysis to examine extant evidence (Meta-Analysis 2). Major open research questions concern the particular textual devices that bring about any effects of literariness on social understanding and the processes carrying these effects. Experiments 5 and 6 will examine the influence of literary texts on the activation of vocabulary which is expected to increase mentalizing performance.