How Interactive Storytelling Persuades: The Mediating Role of Website Contingency and Narrative Transportation

ABSTRACT

While digital media technology has applied the “choose-your-own-adventure” type of storytelling to many different contexts, a rigorous empirical examination of the persuasive effect of interactive storytelling has only recently begun. Filling this gap, the current study investigates how interactive features added to a health-themed story addressing the obesity epidemic in the U.S. enhance the story’s persuasive effectiveness. Findings from an online experiment (N = 134) showed that the interactive story enhanced perceived contingency, which led to greater narrative transportation to the story. Greater transportation resulted in more story-consistent beliefs and higher intention to revisit the website.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ The current study uses a subsample (N = 134) from a larger data set (N = 385) that was reported in a published study (Oh et al., 2018). Participants were randomly assigned to either the high-interactive map or low-interactive map condition, but the variation in the map design did not exert any significant influence on the reported outcomes in the current study and was dropped from all analyses. The perceived contingency was reported as a manipulation check in the published study and is the only variable used both in the current and the published study. Apart from this, there are no other overlapping elements between the two studies.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jeeyun Oh

Jeeyun Oh (Ph.D., Penn State University) is an assistant professor of the School of Advertising & Public Relations at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research interests include the psychology of media technology, human-computer interaction, UX/UI, health communication, and environmental communication.

Hayoung Sally Lim (M.A., UT Austin) is a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Advertising & Public Relations at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research interests focus on the interactive activities between brands and consumers on social media, which affecs consumer-brand relationships, crisis communication, and consumer behavior.

Angel Hsing-Chi Hwang is a Ph.D. student in the Communication Department at Cornell University. As a human-computer interaction (HCI) researcher, she is interested in the media effect and psychology of interactive technology, including VR, AR, and AI-mediated platforms, as well as their applications to augmenting team collaboration, creativity, and learning.