Concreteness and Abstractness as Causes and Effects of Identification with Media Characters

ABSTRACT

We explored new antecedents and consequences of identification with media characters that are related to concreteness or abstractness of representations. First, we examined how the portrayal of the protagonist’s behavior affects the reader’s identification with her. Participants read one of four narratives in which we manipulated the character’s usual behavior (abstract traits) and her behavior on a specific bad day (concrete states). As expected, when the character had positive traits but behaved unkindly in the negative situation, compared to the other conditions, the readers (N = 206) identified more strongly with her through the mediation of higher situational attributions, i.e. attributing the protagonist’s behavior more to the situation than to her traits. Then we examined the effect of identification on the readers’ concrete and abstract thoughts. We hypothesized and found that stronger identification with the character was related to increasingly more concrete thinking about the protagonist’s specific plans and reactions regarding the situation than abstract thinking about the protagonist’s life in general. Additionally, stronger identification was associated with more concrete thoughts about the readers themselves through the partial mediation of concrete thoughts about the character. These findings may reconcile previous inconsistent results about identification and have implications for narrative persuasion.

Acknowledgments

The funding by the Zefat Academic College was granted to the first author.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/15213269.2023.2256214

Notes

1. The questionnaire also included a measure of enjoyment of the movie and questions regarding the perceived sociability of the protagonist. These questions were outside the scope of the current study, and thus were not analyzed.

2. The data underlying this article will be shared on request.

3. We also measured abstract thinking with regard to the self but we do not elaborate about it. We intended to use difference scores for concrete vs. abstract thoughts for the mediation in H4. As the difference score with regard to the character was not reliable, we did not use any difference score in H4, and the mediation focused only on measures of concrete thinking.

4. Using difference scores has been criticized in various research fields as being less reliable than their components (e.g., Cafri et al., 2010). Others, however, have mentioned the common use of difference scores in making a noteworthy contribution to understanding phenomena in cognitive psychology and social psychology, if applied with caution based on the case in hand (e.g., Trafimow, 2015). We believe that using a difference “situational minus trait” score as a dependent variable (H1) and a mediator (H2) in the current study does reflect meaningful theoretical information. The score is acceptable if the component scores themselves are reliable and do not have high correlations with each other (Tisak & Smith, 1994). Moreover, as recommended (Furr, 2011), we present descriptive statistics and information about its psychometric quality in addition to information about the separate components. The estimated reliability of the difference score (r_DD) was calculated according to an adequate equation (Equation 7.6, Furr, 2011).

5. A total of 20 participants were dropped due to failure to respond correctly to both questions. Participant loss occurred in all four story conditions: negative personality and situational unkindness (n = 2), positive personality and situational kindness (n = 5), positive personality and situational unkindness (n = 9), negative personality and situational kindness (n = 4).

6. To determine the need for controlling for gender when identification served as an independent variable, we conducted additional analyses to assess the impact of gender on other variables. The results indicated that gender had no significant effect on the construal level regarding the media character (concrete vs. abstract), F < 1. Furthermore, we found that gender did not significantly impact the readers’ concrete thoughts about Rotem or their concrete thoughts about the self, Fs <1. Based on these findings, we decided to control for gender when examining H1 and H2, while not including it as a control variable in H3 and H4.

7. Running the analysis without gender as a covariate yielded the same pattern. Specifically, there was a significant main effect of the manipulated usual behavior, F(1,202) = 7.442, p = .007, MSE = 1.861, η²_p = .036, while the other main effect and the interaction did not reach significance level.

8. Running the analysis again without controlling for gender did not impact our findings. Specifically, reading about the character’s situational unkindness led to more situational than trait attributions to her behavior, compared to the other conditions, b = .97, SE = .36, p = .008, supporting H1, and the character’s situational unkindness was related to stronger identification through the mediation of more situational than trait attribution, IE = .20, SE = .09, 95% CI [.045, .397], supporting H2.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Zefat Academic College [96/2021 to the first author].