Does it matter if a story character lives or dies?: a message experiment comparing survivor and death narratives

Abstract

Objective

In narratives, characters often face threats where they either live (survivor narratives) or die (death narratives). Both outcomes have the potential to persuade, and are frequently utilised in mass communication campaigns, yet more research is needed examining the relative effectiveness and underlying mechanisms of each strategy.

Design

U.S. adults (N = 1010) were randomly assigned to a 2 (survivor, death) × 2 (non-foreshadowed, foreshadowed) × 2 (within-study replication: narrative 1, narrative 2) between-participants experiment with melanoma stories as stimuli.

Main Outcome Measures

Intentions to engage in sun safe behaviour and skin self-examination behaviour were assessed in the pre- and posttest, and then transformed into change scores.

Results

Death narratives increased sun safe behaviour intentions. Consistent with the entertainment overcoming resistance model, foreshadowed death narratives were found to increase sun safe behaviour intentions via increased transportation and decreased counterarguing.

Conclusion

Compared to survivor narratives, death narratives increase intentions to engage in sun safe behaviour. The findings offer support for character death as a key feature of narrative persuasion, and narrative transportation and counterarguing as important mediational pathways.

Keywords:

• Survivor
• death
• melanoma
• narrative
• narrative transportation
• counterarguing

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available on Mendeley at http://dx.doi.org/10.17632/mrpspn2spj.1.

Additional information

Funding

This manuscript was written with support from NIH grant 1DP2EB022360-01 (PI: J. Jensen) and 3P30CA042014-29S7 (PI: J. Jensen); National Cancer Institute; National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering.