To know or not to know: Comprehending protagonists’ beliefs and their emotional consequences

Abstract

Six experiments explored how readers take the protagonist's mental perspective in stories involving conflicting beliefs about a situation. Experiments 1. 2 and 3 demonstrated that readers with privileged information build emotional inferences corresponding to the protagonist's (wrong) beliefs. The time course of inferences was studied in Experiments 2, 4, 5, and 6. The results suggest that inferences related to the protagonist's beliefs are backward inferences at the text integration stage. Experiment 3 showed that negation markers are not necessary for mental perspective effects. It was concluded that readers as side participants are able to dissociate the protagonist's and their own beliefs about a narrative situation.