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

故事提高观众社会理解（在心理化、共情/同情、图式和态度方面）的潜力已经引起了大量理论和实证的关注。这一领域的大多数研究者通过“文学小说”或“虚构叙事”来讨论叙事的心理影响，从而将叙事性、虚构性和/或文学性混为一谈。实证研究才刚刚开始解决故事的哪些方面驱动其影响的问题：叙事形式或叙事程度对故事对社会理解的影响至关重要吗？还是文学性（文学文本vs.类型媒体）更适合（甚至需要）影响社会理解？虚构性（非虚构与虚构）是否发挥了作用？该项目旨在深入了解叙事文学小说在概念上不同的三个方面——叙事性、虚构性和文学性——并研究它们在促进社会理解方面的独特作用。我们在工作包1中的重点是叙事性。我们将进行一项荟萃分析，以总结现有的实验证据，证明故事对社会理解的影响，重点是实验文本的特征，这些特征构成了叙事的程度（荟萃分析1）。我们将进一步开展一项准实验研究（准实验1）和一项实验（实验2），以考察与叙事相关的文本特征如何与对故事人物的理解、传递和同理心/同情的流动相关联。在工作包2中，我们将讨论虚构的作用，重点是媒体选择。对媒体动机选择的研究表明，人们更喜欢与他们的态度和信仰相一致的信息，这些信息提供了一个积极的群体形象。鉴于人们意识到虚构故事与非虚构故事在认知状态上的差异，对于作为虚构故事引入的故事，动机回避应该减少。这一假设在态度和信念（实验3）和群体内描述（实验4）方面得到了检验。在工作包3中，我们将研究文学性和社会理解的关系。该工作包包括一个检验现有证据的元分析（元分析2）。主要的开放性研究问题是关于文学性对社会理解产生影响的特定文本手段以及承载这些影响的过程。实验5和实验6将考察文学文本对词汇激活的影响，这有望提高心理化表现。

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.