How character goal pursuit “moves” audiences to share meaningful stories

ABSTRACT

Recent research has examined the theme-level determinants of how stories move readers. Our research examined what moves readers in more nuance. Specifically, we examined how readers’ perception of a character’s goal pursuit (i.e., their motivation to complete a goal, goal desire intensity, and goal pursuit struggle) leads to narrative engagement, which we posit is an antecedent to being moved. The degree to which readers are moved should then influence their intention to share the story. Across two studies, character motivation consistently influenced narrative engagement, particularly emotional engagement, which evokes the experience of being moved. Being moved by the story – but not enjoyment – increased readers’ intentions to share it with others. We argue that media psychology researchers should incorporate being moved into their broader models of narrative engagement for both basic and applied research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Notes

1. Please note that we will use readers and viewers interchangeably throughout the paper. We do this because we tested people’s experiences with both filmed (in Study 1) and written (in Study 2) narratives. We assume that similar processes operate on people’s narrative experiences regardless of the medium with which they experience them (see Gerrig, 1993).

2. For approximately half of the participants, we obtained one additional measure for each construct (desire: “To what extent do you think (character) desired to (goal)”; i.e., “To what extent do you think Kevin desired to help people who were considering ending their lives?” r = .74, p < .001; motivation: “To what extent do you think you understand [character’s] motivation to [goal]”; i.e., “To what extent do you think you understand Kevin’s motivation to help people considering ending their lives?” r = .85, p < .001; struggle: “How much do you think [character] struggled to [goal]?” i.e., “How much do you think Kevin struggled to help people contemplating suicide?” r = .67, p < .001). We ran the model tested in Figure 2 with this subgroup of participants, using the latent variables of these story perception variables as predictors. The model fit in a similar manner (CFI: .93, RMSEA: .07, χ²(262) = 848.15, p < .001). The patterns of significance are the same; particularly, the paths between motivation and narrative engagement (b = .36, t = 6.00, p < .001) and struggle and narrative engagement (b = .41, t = 6.87, p < .001) are significant, and the path between desire and engagement (-> narrative engagement path is not (b = −.01, t = −.25, p = .80).

3. Power analyses for tests of core path coefficients in the model indicated that the statistical power for a given coefficient, assuming a two-tailed test with alpha level of 0.05, was consistently greater than 0.95.

4. Data can be accessed at: https://osf.io/pe9v7/?view_only=0ddf827553ac4b2aa9f4714105e9c530.

5. When we regress eudaimonic response onto motivation, struggle, and desire directly, there is a significant effect of motivation (b = .45, t = 9.64, p < .001) and struggle (b = .32, t = 8.01, p < .001), but not desire (the effect is marginal: b = .08, t = 1.70, p = .09).

6. We fit the model from Study 1 to the Study 2 data (including the experimental manipulations as predictors instead of the measured variables, as in study 1). Overall, the model fit well (p = .00, CFI = .95, RMSEA = .07, χ²(179) = 309.89), and replicated the basic patterns of effects (See Online Appendix K).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Hofstra University Zarb School of Business Summer Research Grant 2018.