Show Me a Photo of the Character: Exploring the Interaction between Text and Visuals in Narrative Persuasion

Abstract

The use of narrative text in health messaging has been ubiquitous. With the popularity of promoting public health on social media, it becomes critical to investigate what visual images should be used to maximize the impact of narrative health-related posts. This study focused on messages designed to communicate the breast cancer risk associated with alcohol use. We conducted a 2 (text: narrative vs. non-narrative) x 2 (visuals: exemplar vs. non-exemplar) between-subjects online experiment (N = 299). Our results showed that narrative (vs. non-narrative) text led to greater attention, stronger negative emotions, and higher intentions to seek information about alcohol use and cancer among female drinkers. The visual exemplar (vs. non-exemplar) also produced higher intentions to seek information and reduce alcohol use. More importantly, including a visual exemplar (vs. non-exemplar) significantly increased negative emotions and subsequently behavioral intentions when the text was a narrative, but the visual content did not make a difference when the text was a non-narrative. The results of this study show the importance of adding a relevant visual exemplar to narrative text, such as a photo of the character, to improve message effectiveness.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary Material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website

Notes

¹ Two types of attention checks were applied: Participants needed to spend at least 10 seconds on the stimulus page to receive a confirmation code and pass two attention check questions in the questionnaire. Among the 415 participants who responded to our study, 114 participants did not provide the confirmation code, and two failed both attention check questions. Thus, their data were deleted.

² Given that participants’ drinking frequency (1 = one to 11 times in the past year, 2 = three times or less a month, 3 = once or twice a week, 4 = three times or more a week) may influence the outcomes, we also conducted a three-way interaction analysis to test whether drinking frequency would moderate the interaction between text and visuals. None of the interaction terms involving drinking frequency was significant. The ANOVA results table is provided in the online supplemental material.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.