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https://doi.org/10.1177/15291006231161337
Psychological Science in the
Public Interest
2022, Vol. 23(3) 99 –141
© The Author(s) 2023
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/15291006231161337
www.psychologicalscience.org/PSPI
ASSOCIATION FOR
PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE
For decades, Brazilians have tuned in to watch tele-
novelas (television soap operas) at 8 p.m. every eve-
ning; their appeal cuts across classes. These telenovelas
have typically portrayed very small families—which is
noteworthy, given that in 1970, as they were becoming
popular, the typical woman had almost six children.
The overwhelming majority of female characters
depicted in telenovelas had no children. Of 115 tele-
novelas aired by the main television network between
1965 and 1999, 72% featured female characters 50 years
old or younger who had no children. Among other
female characters, three quarters had only one child
(La Ferrara etal., 2012).
One might wonder what effect these depictions of
small families could have had on Brazilian society. It
certainly correlated with major social change: Between
1970 and 1991, Brazil’s fertility fell by half—from 5.8
to 2.9 children per woman. The drop occurred even
though the government made no effort at population
control until the late 1970s. To investigate the role of
these soap operas, La Ferrara et al. (2012) examined
patterns of expansion in television access. In 1970, less
than one in 10 Brazilian households owned a television,
but by 1991, the figure had increased to more than eight
in 10. The network airing the soap operas, Globo, also
rapidly expanded throughout Brazil. In 1970, only four
areas received a television signal. By 1980, 1,300 areas
received a signal, and 3,147 had a signal by 1991. La
Ferrara and her colleagues used variation in access to
Globo to estimate the effect of exposure to soap operas.
Their analysis suggests that these broadcasts resulted
in a drop in the fertility rate of approximately 7%. It
can be difficult to pin down whether these effects were
causal, even with precise covariation. But qualitative
traces of soap operas’ effects paint a picture: Approxi-
mately a third of the children born in areas with signal
access were given names of soap opera characters. In
areas with no access, less than a 10th were. The esti-
mated effects were sizeable, almost two thirds as
impactful as the effect of the increase in years of school-
ing during the same period.
1161337PPIXXX10.1177/15291006231161337Walsh et al.Psychological Science in the Public Interest
research-article2023
Corresponding Author:
James Walsh, Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford
Email: james.walsh@bsg.ox.ac.uk; jamie.s.walsh@gmail.com
Stories in Action
James Walsh1,2 , Naomi Vaida3, Alin Coman3,
and Susan T. Fiske3
1Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford; 2Department of Psychology, Harvard University;
and 3Department of Psychology, Princeton University
Abstract
Stories have played a central role in human social and political life for thousands of years. Despite their ubiquity in
culture and custom, however, they feature only peripherally in formal government policymaking. Government policy
has tended to rely on tools with more predictable responses—incentives, transfers, and prohibitions. We argue that
stories can and should feature more centrally in government policymaking. We lay out how stories can make policy
more effective, specifying how they complement established policy tools. We provide a working definition of stories’
key characteristics, contrasting them with other forms of communication. We trace the evolution of stories from their
ancient origins to their role in mediating the impact of modern technologies on society. We then provide an account of
the mechanisms underlying stories’ impacts on their audiences. We conclude by describing three functions of stories—
learning, persuasion, and collective action.
Keywords
stories, narratives, social learning, persuasion, cooperation, media, storytelling, behavioral science
100 Walsh et al.
What is (and should be) the role of stories in society,
and how can a psychological analysis inform this dis-
cussion? Stories have generated controversy for thou-
sands of years. For Plato, they misrepresented the truth
and failed to inspire virtue or morality. He argued that
playwrights and actors should be exiled from Athens.
Aristotle famously disagreed. In Poetics—his treatise on
narrative,1 which is still used to teach dramatists today—
he proposed that stories were a source of self-
understanding. Aristotle maintained that theater, especially
tragedy, was necessary to arouse people’s emotions and
aid self-understanding (Aristotle, ca. 335 B.C.E./2013;
Plato, ca. 375 B.C.E./2000; Stern, 2014). Philosophers
and literary theorists have since sought to make sense
of the structure and function of stories. But only in the
past two centuries have scholars developed the tools
to analyze stories systematically (Lévi-Strauss, 1978;
Propp, 1968). Even more recently, advances in compu-
tational methods and the availability of comprehensive
data have transformed scientific understanding of nar-
rative (R. L. Boyd etal., 2020; Michalopoulos & Xue,
2021). Meanwhile, evidence from experimental research
has now accumulated to reveal the role of stories in
human psychology (Green etal., 2002; László, 2008).
Today’s skeptics echo some of Plato’s complaints.
One criticism holds that stories are the antonym of
truth. Children are chided for “telling stories”—in other
words, lying. More subtly, scholars often imply that
stories discourage audiences from rationally assessing
systematic evidence by seducing those audiences into
the particularities of their narrative worlds. For exam-
ple, Borgida and Nisbett (1977) found that course rec-
ommendations made on the basis of brief personal
stories had much larger impacts on students’ course
choices than recommendations based on courses’ aver-
age scores from evaluations. Stories’ ability to capture
their audiences’ attention and emotion mean that even
complete fictions can shape how people see the world.
Another critique discounts stories not because they
misinform but because they supposedly do not matter.
Though this may be hard to believe for scholars com-
mitted to the power of narrative, this view pervades
subfields of economics, finance, political science, and
even history. What really counts, according to this view,
are prices, technologies, and the allocation of material
resources. In this view, people are rational actors,
unpersuaded by rhetoric or advertisements. They rigor-
ously extract only the data they need—whether the
source is a story, a recipe, an argument, or a formula—
to accurately update their beliefs and pursue their inter-
ests (Stigler & Becker, 1977).
This article refutes these two arguments. First, stories
do matter. This review shows that stories have played
a key role in the development of modern society and
specifies how they can improve government policy.
Moreover, psychological science is beginning to under-
stand more precisely why they matter. Second, far from
being vehicles of mistruth, stories are in fact a vital
communication tool that people use to pragmatically
solve a host of social and developmental problems—
from teaching children to read to coordinating large-
scale social activities. We nevertheless concede that
stories—their nature and function—are poorly under-
stood by government policymakers. To this end, this
review brings together research from psychology,
behavioral economics, and related fields to lay out how
stories can be harnessed more effectively to improve
government policy design.
Overview
After this introductory section, the second section consid-
ers the implications of the science of stories for policy
design. Narratives can improve the effectiveness of two
standard policy instruments: incentive and information
provision. Stories can make incentives more effective by
communicating the meaning that motivates them. Stories
can improve information campaigns by communicating
easily digestible, generalizable information to large audi-
ences and by addressing sensitive issues.
The third section defines stories and describes their
key features. Stories are concrete—they describe specific
events. Stories depict agency—they are about protago-
nists and their goals. Stories contain causal sequences—
they provide a template for how action unfolds. Stories
have their own logic, and people evaluate them differ-
ently from other information structures.
The fourth section traces the evolution of stories. It
reviews the origins of storytelling and how advances
in writing systems transformed humans’ capacity to
communicate sophisticated stories at scale. It then dis-
cusses how stories were democratized with the inven-
tion of technologies such as the printing press, radio,
television, and social media. As the reach of stories
expanded, their impacts on social and political life have
become increasingly visible.
The fifth section describes the story mechanisms that
impact cognition: engagement, identification, and
meaning construction. Stories engage, or equivalently
transport, when they captivate attention and emotion-
ally absorb people, for example, by creating suspense.
Stories also invite people to identify with their charac-
ters. In doing so, the audience learns from the perspec-
tives of the protagonist. Finally, stories embed causal
models that offer people ways to make sense of the
world. These three mechanisms are key paths via which
stories lead people to update their beliefs, attitudes,
and behaviors in story-consistent ways.
Psychological Science in the Public Interest 23(3) 101
The sixth section zooms out to describe three soci-
etal functions of stories: social learning, deliberate per-
suasion, and collective action. First, it discusses how
stories aid social learning and teaching. Stories enable
social learning without direct observation and facilitate
teaching by making information more memorable and
understandable. Second, narrators use stories to affect
attitudes, beliefs, and behavior. Stories are persuasive
because they reduce reactance, they convey causal
models, and they facilitate vicarious engagement. Third,
stories address collective action problems, such as coor-
dination challenges and social dilemmas. Stories do so
by establishing common knowledge: shared expecta-
tions, explanations, reputations, and identities.
Stories and Public Policy
Societies have used stories as vehicles for communicat-
ing important information for thousands of years.
Although they are commonplace in politics, stories fea-
ture only peripherally in government policymaking.
Policymakers are trained to design laws and social pro-
grams on the basis of the principles of economic theory.
In this paradigm, people are assumed to be economi-
cally rational actors. They maximize their expected util-
ity by calculating the costs and benefits of different
courses of action. They also have the capacity to pro-
cess unlimited information, enabling them to formulate
beliefs as Bayesian statisticians (Stigler & Becker, 1977).
This approach assumes not only that people are self-
interested but also that they think in what Jerome
Bruner calls the “logico-scientific” mode—thinking
through arguments in terms of their logical implications
and evaluating the strength of evidence substantiating
different claims (Bruner, 1986). The model provides
governments with two main policy tools: incentives and
information. In recent years, behavioral policymakers—
scientists and practitioners housed in government units
focused on behavioral change—have incorporated psy-
chological insights into policy on the basis of the idea
that people are biased toward heuristics and shortcuts.
For example, sending timely reminders improves adher-
ence even to lifesaving drugs, and making pension
contributions the default increases savings, even though
having to opt in or opt out should not affect rational
decision-making on such a significant issue. This article
builds on dual-process frameworks in behavioral policy
to emphasize that people think narratively. This has
several implications for policy.
Incentives
Stories can make incentives, the cornerstone of modern
government policy, more effective. Policymakers use
incentives to shift behavior by taxing or subsidizing
activities (e.g., by putting a levy on alcohol or offering
people lower interest rates for educational loans). They
also use them when threatening to impose fines or jail
time for people found in violation of regulations or
laws. According to economic theory, laws discourage
criminal behavior by making it costly. People are
assumed to weigh up the costs by combining the likeli-
hood of being punished with the magnitude of the
punishment (Becker, 1968). Stories can make incentives
more effective in several ways.
First, stories can establish the meaning of incentives.
Rational actors, or homo economicus, make decisions
by coolly calculating their costs and benefits. Human
beings, on the other hand, are cultural beings. They
make decisions, even about how to respond to prices,
by applying meaning to the context (E. Anderson, 1995;
Sunstein, 1994). When people misconstrue the meaning
of an incentive, it can backfire. A study from Israel
examining the effect of day-care fines for parents who
pick up their children late is illustrative. When ran-
domly selected day cares introduced a fine to discour-
age parents from arriving late, parents arrived even later
than they did at day cares in the control group. The
parents, the authors argue, interpreted the fine as a
price. Parents did not feel comfortable taking advantage
of teachers’ patience, but once the fine was introduced,
they felt more comfortable paying to arrive late (Gneezy
& Rustichini, 2000). Stories can be effective ways of
communicating the rationale for fines, taxes, and sub-
sidies. Consider, for example, fines for speeding. People
may “price in” the cost of occasional tickets for speeding—
determining that the occasional ticket is worth time
saved. However, if speeding tickets are accompanied
by campaigns containing stories about the rationale for
speeding tickets (i.e., to discourage speeding because
it can lead to fatal car accidents), the social meaning
of being fined may lead people to avoid the fee because
of the moral weight associated with it.
Second, stories can make incentives more effective
by reifying the implications of the cost. One prediction
of the economic approach to crime and punishment is
that longer sentences should discourage criminal behav-
ior. Empirical evidence for this prediction is weak, how-
ever (Chalfin & McCrary, 2017). Moreover, incarceration
is expensive to the state and to the incarcerated indi-
vidual. One explanation for why longer or more puni-
tive sentences are weak deterrents is that although
people generally know what kinds of activities are ille-
gal, they are not good at assessing the probability and
severity of punishment. They tend to qualitatively base
their estimates on actual or vicarious experiences (Apel,
2013). This presents an important entry point for stories,
which can shape how people perceive both the
102 Walsh et al.
likelihood and cost of punishment. For example, stories
could convey the life events missed through incarcera-
tion. A mere statement that being convicted of a particu-
lar law results in a 10- to 15-year sentence does little to
bring to life the experienced cost of prison. But stories
can do more than this. They can also zoom into contexts
in which people have to decide whether to engage in
illegal behavior and model how to escape situations in
which there are pressures toward criminal behavior.
Information provision
Governments can use stories to improve how they com-
municate information, another key function of govern-
ment. Governments are responsible for informing
citizens about the safety of consumer products and for
advising people how to access social services, such as
education and training opportunities. They give people
instructions on how to vote and provide guidance on
how to stay safe from disease. The norm is to focus on
facts, statistics, and instructions—aiming to help people
make decisions based on good evidence derived from
systematic data collection. Stories are rarely representa-
tive accounts of the real world that depict the average
person undertaking the most common activities. They
are often fictional—explicit mental constructions of
things that never actually happened. Government poli-
cymakers should be careful, of course, to ensure that
the information they convey is based on good evidence.
Stories can nevertheless be useful for several reasons.
First, people are adept at recovering generalizable
information from stories that they can then adapt and
use in their day-to-day lives. Government communica-
tion often aims to convey complex information about
how to undertake activities (e.g., registering a company,
paying taxes, or applying to college). When these pro-
cesses are presented as abstract lists of generic rules,
requirements, steps, or principles, they may be so cog-
nitively taxing that they discourage people from even
considering undertaking the action. The process can,
alternatively, be described in narrative terms. Consider,
for example, the story of Hannah, who wants to start
a dog-walking business but has no experience register-
ing a company. She looks up the form online and at
first is daunted by the amount of detail requested but
then quickly realizes it is manageable. She enters her
details and goes to the bank to acquire the required
documentation, then submits the application. Several
weeks later, she is the owner of a registered company.
Whether the story is literally true or not has no bearing
on the audience’s ability to register a company. Rather,
the story’s effectiveness will be determined by its ability
to engage the audience and convey key causal relation-
ships in a lifelike way.
Second, people are attracted to stories as to virtually
no other information source. This makes them distinc-
tively scalable ways of reaching large numbers of peo-
ple. High-quality stories often reach remarkably large
audiences, so the distributed cost per person is very
low. BBC Media Action, a nonprofit focused on using
stories to promote social development, reaches approx-
imately 100 million people every year around the world,
a number that resembles the population size of large
countries. Stories’ reach means that they not only are
an efficient way of communicating information to the
public but also can be distinctively effective at solving
collective action problems, in which everybody needs
to coordinate on a shared understanding. Stories can
coordinate groups around national efforts toward, for
example, environmental protection, national defense,
or public health.
Third, stories can depict a multitude of possibilities,
making them an effective route to counteract unequal
social structures. A key policy goal for most democratic
governments is to make society fairer and to promote
equality of opportunity. Social rigidities are one major
obstacle to this goal. For example, children who grow
up in families and communities where pursuing higher
education is normal can imagine without difficulty what
life would be like at college. They learn through rela-
tionships and networks how to prepare their applica-
tions. When they arrive, they know what courses to
take, and when they finish, they know the kinds of jobs
to seek. The problem is not that advantaged and dis-
advantaged groups misperceive the world. Rather, the
problem is that the world is so segregated that it limits
people’s access to possible worlds. In the real world,
families in disadvantaged neighborhoods generally do
not know many people who went to college, and
college-bound families rarely spend time in areas of
socioeconomic deprivation. In these cases, it is pre-
cisely because the credibility of fictional stories is not
based on their literal truth that their representations
can emancipate people.
Fourth, stories are an adaptable tool for navigating
sensitive cultural issues in which governments face cri-
ses of trust—such as election integrity, police conduct,
and the safety of vaccines. Stories can do this in several
ways. One way, for example, is that stories can reduce
reactance. When information is presented to people in
the form of a story, they are less likely to feel that they
are being manipulated and to counterargue (Kreuter
etal., 2010). Another way is that stories can signal to
diverse audiences—demographic or political—that the
communicator understands their perspective. This can
be done, for example, by telling a story from the point
of view of a member of a particular group, or it can
represent a protagonist having a moment of realization
Psychological Science in the Public Interest 23(3) 103
about a particular group’s truth. This can be especially
powerful when groups feel that their perspective on an
issue is being misrepresented or caricatured by the
media or decision-makers.
In summary, stories can be an important addition to
the policymaker’s toolbox. They can make incentives
more effective by communicating their meaning and by
reifying the implications of incentives. They can make
information campaigns more effective, despite the fact
that they are not systematic representations of the truth.
This is because (a) people are good at pragmatically
extracting useful information from stories, (b) people
are more drawn to stories than other forms of informa-
tion, (c) stories can help people imagine a reality
beyond the status quo, and (d) stories enable commu-
nicators to establish trust with their audiences.
The Definition and Structure of Stories
Stories are information structures, but so are all mental
representations. A central challenge in empirical work
on stories is distinguishing narrative from other forms
of communication, such as instructions, arguments, and
statistical tables. Cognitive psychologists have studied
how stories are represented in the mind since the 1970s
and 1980s (Black & Wilensky, 1979; Mandler, 1982;
Mandler & Johnson, 1977; Rumelhart, 1975; Stein, 1982;
Stein & Trabasso, 1981; Trabasso & van den Broek,
1985). Dahlstrom (2014) emphasizes three key features
of stories: (a) Stories depict temporal events, (b) stories
are concerned with goal-directed agents, and (c) stories
represent causally related sequences.
Although these features are guideposts, defining sto-
ries in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions can
lead to counterintuitive conclusions. On the one hand,
some communication may meet these criteria but not
be recognizable as a story—for example, simple
descriptions of human behavior. On the other hand,
communication may lack these features—for example,
visual art—but implicitly contain stories. For this rea-
son, narrativity may be best thought of as a continuum
based on family resemblances (Stein, 1982; see also
Rosch & Mervis, 1975). Prototypically, stories represent
the vicissitudes of human action—either implicitly or
explicitly referring to causal sequences of events and
agents undertaking goal-directed behavior (Mandler &
Johnson, 1977; Prince, 1973; Stein, 1982).2
To illustrate how vicissitudes (i.e., sudden changes
in circumstances) increase the prototypicality of stories,
consider a simple passage: “John was out of milk, so
he went to the store to pick some up.” The passage
meets the basic criteria for a narrative. There is a tem-
poral event (buying milk at the store), there is a pro-
tagonist (John), and there is a causal sequence of
events (John went to buy milk because he was out of
it). But the passage only barely resembles a story. A
reader is unlikely to be transported into the story world,
to identify with John, or to derive meaning from the
information. Imagine the passage continued with,
As he deliberated over whether to go for the oat
or almond variety, he noticed something was
amiss. The cashier had a look of terror on her
face. Suddenly, John realized he was in the middle
of an armed robbery. As he dropped to the floor,
distant sirens began to get louder.
The inciting event makes the passage more prototypi-
cally storylike. We are transported into the scene and
wonder what will happen next. Depending on what John
decides to do, we might extract some useful lesson.
Another consideration is that stories often reference
implicit knowledge: Audiences must draw on back-
ground information from their own memory to con-
struct meaning out of the chain of events. The passage
“the cashier had a look of terror on her face” implies
that something frightening has happened because
frightening events terrify people. The passage “distant
sirens began to get louder” implies that the police were
on their way. Similarly, the audience may reference
other stories in making sense of the plot. For example,
if the robbers were zombies, the audience might strug-
gle to understand why John would protect himself with
garlic (alleged to repel vampires). One challenge is that
stories often mean different things to different people,
depending on the references they use to interpret the
story. To judge the plausibility of stories, people draw
on their repertoire of cultural knowledge, which varies
from group to group (Polletta, 1998). In Currie’s (1990)
account, readers relate both to the text and to their
construction of the author’s intent. This particularly
matters in regard to stories used in the public interest.
For example, John’s race or the identity of the author
would inform audience interpretation of whether John
is equally afraid of the police and the robbers.
Events
The most basic feature of stories is that things happen.
They are concerned with particular or concrete repre-
sentations, set in a time and place. The story of Rapun-
zel is about a lonely princess locked away in a remote
tower tucked into the woods. The textual scene “a long
time ago in a galaxy far, far away” transports the mind
into the fantastical world of Star Wars. “The conve-
nience store exterior was covered with local gang graf-
fiti” conveys a run-down urban settings. Stories’
concreteness contrasts with abstract representations,
104 Walsh et al.
such as equations, theorems, proofs, and many argu-
ments, which make no reference to time or space. Sto-
ries work in precisely the opposite way. They draw
audiences into the specifics of the scene. Bruner (1986)
writes that narratives “strive to put timeless miracles
into the particulars of experience, and to locate that
experience in time and space,” whereas logical or sci-
entific modes of thought conversely aim “to transcend
the particular” (p. 13).
Agents
Agency is a second distinguishing feature of stories.
Stories deal with protagonists’ desires, beliefs, and
actions. The protagonist may be a person, a group, an
animal, some fictional species, or even an inanimate
object that has been anthropomorphized.3 The philoso-
pher Daniel Dennett calls this “the intentional stance.”4
As a result of their depiction of agency, stories engage
with subjectivity in a way that nonnarrative forms do
not. Stories invite their audience to see things from the
protagonist’s point of view. Actors’ goals and desires,
and what they think, feel, know, and (sometimes cru-
cially) do not know, are often central to narrative
(Bruner, 1986). One advantage of dealing in subjectivity
is that stories can represent multiple perspectives, con-
veying different actors’ goals, desires, and beliefs—
without the need for them to be complete.
Causal sequences
Causal sequences are the third feature of stories. Nar-
ratives give coherence to the organization of events
(Black & Bern, 1981; Trabasso & Sperry, 1985; White,
1990)—a logic to their unfolding. Decisions are made,
plans are disrupted, hearts are broken, and plots are
foiled. Although people assess the strength of regular
arguments by referencing classical standards of consis-
tency or empirical proof, they assess stories on the basis
of their lifelikeness (Bruner, 1986) or at least their plau-
sibility within the narrative world. Actions have conse-
quences. Betrayal triggers revenge. Bravery elicits
admiration. Stories must resemble human life to be
understood.
Plots engage their audience by creating and resolv-
ing uncertainty. Just as audiences quickly zone out if
stories are too absurd (the robbers are not only vam-
pires but also unicorns), audiences are also put off by
mundane descriptions of everyday life (e.g., John goes
to the store, buys milk, and goes home; Nyhof & Barrett,
2001). If we learn that the robbers kidnap the cashier,
we want to know the outcome. The uncertainty draws
us in. Yet the range of ways in which we are willing to
engage with this uncertainty is limited. In line with this,
literary scholars had long argued that stories follow
particular formulas.
The structure of stories
Many scholars have sought to identify an underlying
structure of good stories. Recently, a computational
project examined a corpus containing millions of texts
shed light on this (R. L. Boyd etal., 2020). The inves-
tigators linked word types to different components of
narrative. Recall that stories are concrete, set in a time
and place. The analysis shows that stories generally
establish concreteness early on in the text as they stage
events and scenes—laying out the backdrop and estab-
lishing locations, characters, and their relationships to
one another. Articles and prepositions feature heavily
in these early parts. The second feature of narratives is
agency. The investigators explored this by looking at
the degree of cognitive tension in the text. They found
that stories start off with low levels of cognitive tension,
but they build and climax in the middle. The final fea-
ture is that stories contain causal sequences of events.
One might think of this as the plot. The investigators
showed that the plot develops progressively through
the text (using pronouns and auxiliary verbs) and cli-
maxes at the end. This suggests that, as literary scholars
have long argued, narratives follow a basic structure
(Fig. 1).
In summary, the distinctive feature of stories, in con-
trast to other information structures, is that they portray
events, they contain agents, and they are organized via
causal sequences. Stories have a number of other
important attributes, however. One is that audiences
generally must draw on detailed implicit knowledge to
make sense of stories. Another is that stories can convey
multiple subjective perspectives, whereas other forms
of communication often present information in an
objective manner. Finally, audiences process the coher-
ence of stories against an internal narrative logic; this
stands in contrast to forms of communication that are
evaluated against classically logical or empirical
standards.
The Evolution of Stories
As best investigators can tell, storytelling is a universal
human practice (D. E. Brown, 2017; Hogan, 2003). Most
daily conversation consists of narratives of some form
or other (Dunbar etal., 1997). People are routinely
motivated to gossip about others (Foster, 2004) and
enjoy sharing their own experiences (Tamir & Mitchell,
2012). A large body of psychology has explored how
people use narratives to construct the self (McAdams,
1993, 2001). The practice of narrativizing identity
Psychological Science in the Public Interest 23(3) 105
enables people to organize their past, to imagine pos-
sible futures, and to give meaning, purpose, and unity
to life (McAdams & McLean, 2013; Singer, 2004). Indeed,
establishing coherent personal narratives forms the
basis of some mental health therapies (Pennebaker &
Seagal, 1999). For decades, many psychologists have
argued that much if not most of human thinking takes
place in narrative form (Bruner, 1986; S. G. B. Johnson
et al., 2022; Mandler, 1984; Sarbin, 1986; Schank &
Abelson, 1995). Some have argued that all thinking
2.25
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Narrative Structure: Plot Progression
Corpus
Plot Progression Score
Segment
TAT
Short Stories
Novels
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Narrative Structure: Staging
Staging Score
Segment
2.25
2.00
1.75
1.50
1.25
1.00
0.75
0.50
12345
0.25
0.00
−0.25
−0.50
−0.75
−1.00
−1.25
−1.50
−1.75
−2.00
−2.25
Narrative Structure: Cognitive Tension
Cognitive Tension Score
Segment
Fig. 1. The structure of stories. Results from text analyses of three aspects of narrative structure (staging, plot progression, and
cognitive tension) are shown separately for three corpora of texts. The red lines reference analysis on novels. The green lines
reference analysis on short stories. The blue lines reference stories written by Internet users in response to thematic prompts
(thematic appreciation test [TAT]). The figure shows that, common across all corpora, language used to construct situations
occurs most frequently at the beginning of the story, language used to establish the momentum of the plot increases quickly
then slowly as the story develops, and language describing cognitive tension rises and then falls. Error bars show standard
errors. (Source: R. L. Boyd etal., 2020.)
106 Walsh et al.
takes place narratively, though this is surely wrong
(W. F. Brewer, 2014). For example, representations of
shapes, logical relations, and physical laws need not
be narratives.
People are drawn to storytellers. The cultlike status
of celebrities (Brooks, 2021; McCutcheon etal., 2002)
may rest on virtually all of them being in the business
of storytelling. The polling company YouGov tracks and
ranks the fame and popularity of notable people in the
United States. As of 2022, almost all of the 10 most
famous people in the United States today had either
written popular memoirs or performed in movies or
reality TV shows prior to achieving major notoriety. All
of the 10 most popular people in the United States were
also actors, though one was primarily a musician.5 The
influence of celebrities on attitudes, beliefs, and behav-
ior is so strong that their endorsements are a key part
of businesses’ marketing strategies (Erdogan, 1999;
Knoll & Matthes, 2017).
Although one might think of the cult of celebrity as
a quintessentially modern phenomenon, the attraction
to storytellers may be rooted in ancient ways of life.
One way to investigate this is to look at communities
living today as most people did thousands of years ago.
A recent study of the Agta, a Filipino hunter-gatherer
population, assessed the role of storytelling in their
communal organization (D. Smith etal., 2017). The
authors found that stories played a key role in regulat-
ing norms and conveying information to group mem-
bers, especially to children. Moreover, when members
of the population from 18 different camps were asked
who they would most like to live with, skilled storytell-
ers were almost twice as likely to be chosen than non-
skilled storytellers. Storytelling ability was more
predictive than skill in hunting, medicinal knowledge,
and camp influence. This relationship held even after
the authors controlled for factors such as kinship, age,
and sex. The preferences that group members stated
were backed up by consequential outcomes, too: Good
storytellers had significantly more children.
One reason that storytellers may be so valued is that
stories are a key vector for maintaining culture through
generations. This is consistent with recent work show-
ing the relationship between countries’ folkloric tradi-
tions and contemporary moral values. Michalopoulos
and Xue (2021) examined a catalog of folklore devel-
oped by the Russian folklorist Yuri Berezkin that con-
tains more than 2,500 motifs from 958 groups around
the world.6 Using the presence of gendered stereotypes
as their independent measure, the authors analyzed
whether gender portrayals in the motifs predicted con-
temporary attitudes toward women. They coded male
stereotypicality on the basis of depictions of men as
dominant, physically active, aggressive, and arrogant
and coded female stereotypicality on the basis of depic-
tions of women as domestic, emotional, beautiful,
dependent, and submissive.7 They found that women
are systematically less integrated into the labor market
in societies with more gender bias in their folklore (i.e.,
they feature more images of dominant and physical
men and domestic women). To give an example, the
Philippines has negligible bias against women in its
traditional folklore, whereas measures of gender bias
in Afghanistan are twice that of the average country
(Fig. 2).
Origins of storytelling
Many researchers have set out to explain how humans
came to be so enthralled with stories, not least because
being lost in imagination may seem to be a maladaptive
strategy for a species facing immediate survival pres-
sures and risks (B. Boyd, 2009; Carroll, 2004; Dissanayake,
1988; Gottschall etal., 2005).8 Brian Boyd summarizes
a potential route on the journey to storytelling:
The pressure to pool ever more information, even
beyond currently shared experience, led to the
invention of language. Language in turn swiftly
unlocked efficient forms of narrative, allowing
early humans to learn much more about their kind
than they could experience at first hand, so that
they could cooperate and compete better through
understanding one another more fully. . . . Once
the strong existing predisposition to play com-
bined with existing capacities for event compre-
hension, memory, imagination, language, and
narrative, we could begin to invent fiction, and to
explore the full range of human possibilities in
concentrated, engaging, memorable forms. First
language, then narrative, then fiction, created
niches that altered selection pressures, and made
us ever more deeply dependent on knowing more
about our kind and our risks and opportunities
than we could discover through direct experience.
(B. Boyd, 2018, abstract)
According to one recent hypothesis, elaborate forms
of storytelling emerged through conversations around
the campfire (Dunbar, 2014). Evidence for the associa-
tion between fire and storytelling comes from the work
of anthropologist Polly Wiessner, who spent several
decades living with the Ju/’hoansi Bushmen, a forager
society of Botswana and Namibia. Over approximately
40 years, Wiessner collected data on the Bushmen’s
conversations. She found that during the day, the
Ju/’hoansi focused on economic issues, jokes, and gos-
sip aimed at regulating behavior. These types of
Psychological Science in the Public Interest 23(3) 107
communication contain basic narrative elements. At
night, however, more than 80% of conversations focused
on elaborate stories: hunting ventures, meat fights, mur-
ders, marriages, bushfires, getting lost, and births
(Wiessner, 2014).
Unfortunately, the campfire thesis cannot date the
origins of storytelling. Humans have had the ability to
control fire for 1 to 2 million years (Berna etal., 2012),
whereas the capacity for language is estimated to be
only about 100,000 years old (Berwick etal., 2013).
a
b
0.044 - 0.085
0.086 - 0.109
0.110 - 0.130
0.146 - 0.158
0.159 - 0.161
0.162 - 0.167
0.168 - 0.179
0.180 - 0.187
0.188 - 0.192
0.193 - 0.195
0.196 - 0.200
0.201 - 0.208
0.209 - 0.215
0.216 - 0.221
0.222 - 0.241
0.242 - 0.277
0.278 - 0.310
0.131 - 0.145
−40
−.15 −.05.050−.1 .1
−20
0
20
40
Male Bias in a Country’s Folklore
Male Bias in the Oral Tradition and Female Labor Force Participation in 2019
Male Bias
Female Labor Force Participation in 2019
Fig. 2. Gender bias in folklore and female labor force participation. The map (a) shows the cross-country
rates at which men, relative to women, are depicted as more dominant and physically active and less
submissive and domestic. The scatterplot (b) shows residuals from a regression testing the relationship
between male bias in each country’s folklore and female labor force participation in 2019. The line indi-
cates the ordinary least squares regression, conditional on continental fixed effects, log year of earliest
publication, and log number of publications. For an explanation of the country abbreviations, see the
source (Michalopoulos & Xue, 2021).
108 Walsh et al.
Ancient cave paintings allow for much more precise
lower-bound estimates. Cave art is thousands of years
old and has been found on every continent. To put their
age in perspective, consider that some cave paintings
depict extinct animals such as the woolly mammoth
(Gross, 2020). Although much of the cave art that has
been discovered is indicative of complex creative
thought, only a small fraction contains hallmarks of
narrative (i.e., representations of scenes or events). Per-
haps the most widely known example of narrative cave
art comes from artwork found in the 1940s in Lascoux,
France. This includes a 17,000-year-old scene (Fig. 3,
left) that seems to depict a wounded bison charging
down a bird-headed shaman (Davenport & Jochim,
1988). More recently, however, evidence of much older
narrative art has been found in cave art in Indonesia
(Aubert etal., 2019). This art, estimated to be more than
40,000 years old, displays a scene with tiny figures
armed with spears and ropes who appear to be hunting
a wild cow (Fig. 3, right).
Writing systems and their implications
We can only speculate about the narrative content of
these images. The advent of writing systems approxi-
mately 5,000 years ago radically improved the effective-
ness of story transmission. The earliest written story of
note is the Epic of Gilgamesh (1999), a mythic poem
written on 12 clay tablets. The standard form was com-
piled by a Mesopotamian priest around 1200 B.C.E.,
but its origins are hundreds of years older.9 The Epic
focuses on the adventures of Gilgamesh, a Sumerian
king who is two thirds god, one third human. The story
opens with Gilgamesh as an unworthy king. He disre-
spects the gods, his subjects are unhappy, and he
delights in jus primae noctis—“the right of first night”—
a rule that entitles him to rape newlywed brides. In a
desire to achieve fame and renown, Gilgamesh and his
friend Enkidu embark on a journey to the Cedar Forests
and defeat the forest’s guardian Humbaba, a monstrous
giant. Although they are successful, Gilgamesh’s friend
Enkidu is eventually killed by the gods, propelling Gil-
gamesh into grief and motivating him to seek out a path
to everlasting life. When he ultimately fails, he comes
to terms with his human mortality and, in doing so,
finally finds true wisdom. The story shows that humans
have been engaged in sophisticated narrative thought
for thousands of years, grappling with important psy-
chological concerns: the drive to attain power, the
importance of friendship, and the tragedy of loss, as
well as the inevitability of death (Abusch, 2001).
As writing systems evolved, the sophistication of sto-
rytelling advanced, too (Puchner, 2018). For thousands
of years, writing consisted of symbols that stood for
particular things in the world. For example, writing
used in Mycenaean Greece up to the 12th century B.C.E.
contained symbols for ox, jug, and barley. Around the
8th century B.C.E., the Phoenicians switched from link-
ing symbols to meaning toward a system that connected
symbols with sounds. This reduced the number of
required signs from hundreds (or sometimes thousands)
to a few dozen. Although the Phoenicians included only
consonants, the Greeks then improved on the Phoeni-
cian system by adding vowels. Not long after, the
Greeks began to use their new alphabet to document
the stories of the Trojan war.10 This period saw the
production of many of the world’s most important texts.
It is in Greek that the Homeric epics, the Iliad and
Odyssey, were codified in text, that Plato recorded the
arguments of Socrates, and that the New Testament
Fig. 3. Evidence of ancient storytelling: the oldest known hunting scene from Europe (~17,000 years old; left) and a much older
hunting scene from Indonesia (> 40,000 years old; right). (Sources: Wikimedia, 2022, and Ratno Sardi, ©2019, respectively.)
Psychological Science in the Public Interest 23(3) 109
described the life of Jesus Christ. The stories contained
in these texts set the cultural foundation for Western
life for the two millennia that followed.
The rise of the printing press
The power of stories accelerated yet again when new
technologies enabled the use of writing for mass com-
munication. In 1440, German inventor Johannes Gutenberg
developed a printing press capable of mass production.
Though the press had already been invented in China,
its alphabet contained thousands of symbols, which
restricted its applications. As Figure 4b shows, the price
of books collapsed after the advent of the printing
press, which was quickly followed by an enormous
increase in book production (Fig. 4a). This period also
saw storytelling flourish, as William Shakespeare pro-
duced plays that delved into the frailty of the human
condition and Miguel de Cervantes wrote the first mod-
ern novel, Don Quixote. These works continue to be
rated by many as the highest accomplishments of
theater and literature. In 2010, when Google embarked
on a mission to scan books at mass scale, they calcu-
lated that approximately 130 million books had been
published since Gutenberg’s invention of the printing
press (Taycher, 2010).
Perhaps more important, the printing press had a
profound effect on literacy. Before its invention, rates
of literacy in societies are thought to have been never
more than about 10%. In the 16th and 17th centuries,
rates of literacy began to explode in Europe in response
to the Protestant Reformation, which promulgated the
doctrine that individuals should develop a personal
relationship with God and Jesus. Out of this need came
the principle of sola scriptura—by scripture alone—
which posits the Bible as the only infallible source of
authority for the Christian faith. This had the effect of
encouraging Christians to learn to read. By 1445, Guten-
berg had published the first mass-produced Bible, and
by the end of the century, presses were operating
throughout Western Europe. Laypeople began to read
the Bible, and the stories within it, themselves. By 1750,
it is estimated that almost 90% of adults living in The
Netherlands were literate (see Fig. 5; Henrich, 2020).
The printing press also enabled pamphlets and
newspapers to circulate regularly. Newly established
coffeehouses throughout Europe were an early venue
for their distribution. In English coffeehouses, “news
could be consumed in a variety of different forms: in
print, both licensed and unlicensed; in manuscript; and
aloud, as gossip, hearsay, and word of mouth” (Cowan,
2008, p. 87). Some social historians, influenced by the
social theorist Jurgen Habermas (1991), hypothesize
that these developments were key to the emergence of
a public sphere in Western society (see also Pincus,
1995). By the 19th century, new processes for making
paper from pulp, the advent of the telegraph, and
reduced postage costs led to a rapid expansion of
newspapers in the United States. Newspapers quickly
became a battleground for partisanship, and many
papers were bully pulpits for political leaders. In 1870,
roughly one in 10 newspapers were independent.
Toward the end of the 19th century, newspapers slowly
became more independent, and by 1920, independence
had become the norm (Gentzkow etal., 2006). News-
paper readership also rose throughout this period, and
by 1920, the average urban adult in America was pur-
chasing more than a newspaper a day (Chandra &
Kaiser, 2015).
Mass print’s influence extended beyond Europe and
the United States. In sub-Saharan Africa, access to print-
ing was heavily shaped by colonialism. Native Africans’
access to printing was restricted to sources made avail-
able by Protestant missionaries who brought presses
with them to print educational material and Bibles.
Throughout the 19th century, missionaries acquired
printing presses and established schools to train local
people in printing. The overwhelming aim was to pro-
mote their religion, but proximity to printing neverthe-
less had significant implications for Africans’ access to
newspapers. The first newspaper intended for Black
readers was published in 1837, the first African news-
paper edited by Africans appeared in 1876, and the first
Black-owned newspaper in South Africa, Imvo
Zabantsundu (African Opinion), was published 8 years
later in 1884. All of these events occurred in regions
close to missions. No newspapers were published in
regions without Protestant missions until the early 20th
century, and no Indigenous-run newspapers were cre-
ated until after the first World War. Contemporary data
from the Afrobarometer show that these patterns had
long-lasting impacts. Africans who today live close to
the location of a mission with a printing press are sig-
nificantly more likely to read the news, to have higher
trust in others, and to have higher education. In democ-
racies, Africans close to missions that had printing
presses are more likely to participate politically. These
effects occur only for missions with printing presses;
proximity to missions without presses, whether Catholic
or Protestant, has no impact on contemporary newspa-
per readership (Cagé & Rueda, 2016).
Broadcasting stories
The dominance of newspapers in the United States
began to decline in the early 20th century. Radio tech-
nologies, originally developed for military and maritime
purposes, were opened up to public use. At first, radio
110 Walsh et al.
played only music. Then, gradually, stations began to
broadcast dramas and comedies. It was not until the
1930s, however, that radio stations were running news-
casts every day. Stations agreed to air the news for 5
min and tell stories that were no more than 12 hr old
(Sweeting, 2015). During this period, radio access was
highly uneven. In some American counties, virtually
every household had access to a radio. In others,
essentially nobody did. This affected politics: Counties
with better access to radio were more likely to vote and
received more generous relief funds during the New
Deal (Strömberg, 2004).
The radio also influenced politics outside of the
United States. During the 1920s, when Germany was
democratic, the radio promoted a pro-democratic and
anti-extremist narrative. Areas with better access to
Gutenberg Invents the
Movable-Type Printing Press
0
500
1000
1500
2000
# Books and Manuscripts Produced in Western
Europe (in millions)
600 700 800 900 1000 1100 1200 1300 1400 1500 1600 1700 1800
Year
Printing Press Arrives in England
0
500
1000
1500
2000
Real Price (relative to 1860 price/cost of living)
in England
1200 1300 1400 1500 1600 1700 1800 1900
Year
a
b
Fig. 4. The mass production of books. Graph (a) shows estimates of the real price of books in
England from the 1200s through the 1800s. The price fell dramatically between 1350 and 1550.
Scholars speculate that the first decline, around 1350, was driven by a transition from parchment
to paper—though data from earlier periods is less reliable. Graph (b) shows the number of books
and manuscripts produced in the 100 years preceding each time point on the x-axis. Book pro-
duction exploded in the middle of the 16th century. (Sources: AI Impacts, 2020; Buringh & Van
Zanden, 2009; Clark, 2004.)
Psychological Science in the Public Interest 23(3) 111
0
20
40
60
80
Estimated Percentage Literacy Rates
1500 1600 1700 1800 1900
Year
Belgium
France
Germany
Ireland
Italy
Netherlands
Poland
Spain
Sweden
United Kingdom
Russia
Fig. 5. Literacy rates in Europe. The estimated levels of literacy in different European coun-
tries are shown for each 50-year period between 1550 and 1900. Results are based on book-
publishing data and measures of literacy. (Sources: Buringh & Van Zanden, 2009; Roser &
Ortiz-Ospina, 2018.)
radio had lower levels of support for the Nazis. When
Hitler came to power, this flipped. Messaging turned to
pro-Nazi propaganda, and the effect reversed. Areas
with radio access were more likely to support the Nazis
(Adena etal., 2015). The role of radio in promoting
conflict has been explored in a number of settings
(DellaVigna et al., 2014; Gagliarducci et al., 2020;
Straus, 2007; Wang, 2021; Yanagizawa-Drott, 2014).
Just as radio has been used to incite violence, it has
also been widely used as a tool for social good. In many
parts of the world, broadcast radio is the primary means
of accessing news and information for millions of peo-
ple. In Benin, for example, evidence from a natural
experiment suggests that access to radio increased chil-
dren’s literacy rates (Keefer & Khemani, 2014). In India,
radio campaigns with stories discouraging people from
supporting corrupt politicians led people to be less
likely to vote for “vote buying” parties (Schechter &
Vasudevan, 2023).
In Rwanda, psychologists and social scientists designed
dramas to reduce prejudice and conflict (Paluck, 2009;
Paluck & Green, 2009). The radio series portrayed a fic-
tional story about two Rwandan communities that resem-
bles the history and conflict between Tutsis and Hutus.
In the drama, the community faces tensions about land-
governance issues. As relations break down, the wealthier
community is attacked. The violence creates victims,
trauma, and refugees. However, some of the characters
speak up against the warring leaders. The stories included
educational messaging about prejudice, violence,
trauma, and healing; they also promoted descriptive and
prescriptive social norms in relation to intergroup behav-
ior. The control group listened to an entertaining drama
about reproductive health. Compared with listeners in
the control group, treatment group listeners’ perceptions
of social norms and their behaviors changed in a range
of domains: intermarriage, open dissent, trust, empathy,
cooperation, and trauma healing. Despite this, the treat-
ment did not appear to change listeners’ personal beliefs
with respect to intergroup violence.
In the United States, radio’s relative influence quickly
faced pressure from television as people’s preferred
source of media. Although people still listen to the
radio in large numbers, television has become the pri-
mary mass medium by a considerable margin. People
watch television for almost 3 hr per day on average—
more than any other activity except sleeping and work-
ing (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2022a). On a typical
evening in the United States in 2021, roughly 35% of
the population was watching television (Bureau of
Labor Statistics, 2022b). The rise of television has had
significant political impacts. For example, it is estimated
that the growth of television caused somewhere
between 25% and 50% of the total decline in voter
turnout from the 1950s through the 1970s (Gentzkow,
2006). Moreover, the rise of Fox News is estimated to
have led between 5% and 30% of non-Republican voters
to switch their support to George W. Bush in the 2000
election (DellaVigna & Kaplan, 2007). Outside of the
United States, exposure to West German television
resulted in people in East Germany reducing their fertil-
ity rate, developing higher aspirations, and developing
112 Walsh et al.
preferences for Western goods (Bönisch & Hyll, 2023;
Bursztyn & Cantoni, 2016; Hyll & Schneider, 2013).
Television also changed people’s core beliefs. People
from areas more exposed to Western television tended
to believe that effort, rather than luck, determined one’s
success in life (Hennighausen, 2015).11
In the past decade, social media has become a major
outlet via which people consume stories. Facebook, for
example, has roughly 2.6 billion active monthly users.
These sites differ fundamentally from previous technolo-
gies in that they enable bottom-up diffusion of stories.
Observers first heralded this new technology as a major
democratic innovation when social media was used by
activists during the Arab Spring (Howard & Hussain,
2013). Since the 2016 U.S. election, however, social
media has come to be seen as a source of divisive and
polarizing content. Facebook’s algorithm at present
appears to produce echo chambers in which people are
less likely to see counterattitudinal content (Levy, 2021).
In summary, stories have played a central role in
human culture throughout history and likely before.
They have enabled societies to maintain cultural prac-
tices and traditions for thousands of years, as can be
seen by the continued relevance of religious, dramatic,
and philosophical texts written long ago. Stories are
also intimately connected to technological develop-
ments. The explosion of literacy rates in Europe fol-
lowing the printing press was motivated by a drive to
read the stories in the Bible. The impact of television
and social media is mediated in large part through the
stories that the technologies broadcast.
Mechanisms of Narrative Impact
This article identifies three core characteristics of nar-
rative. Stories are grounded in temporal events, contain
goal-oriented agents, and entail causal sequences. Com-
bined, these features make stories engaging and enable
people to extract meaning from them. Transportation
and engagement describe the audience being cogni-
tively and emotionally immersed in the story world.
Identification refers to the strength of the connection
between the audience and story characters. Meaning
making describes how people extrapolate from the
causal models embedded in the story to their own deci-
sion problems. This section discusses each mechanism
in turn.
Transportation
Good stories transport people into the story world.
Transportation refers to the state of being so immersed
in a story that the audience can forget where they are
(Green & Brock, 2000; Slater & Rouner, 2002). Stories
that do this hold the audience’s attention, enabling
them to filter out environmental stimuli so that they can
allocate cognitive attention and emotional energy to
the narrative. Transportation affects the audience in
several ways (Appel etal., 2015). They lose track of
time as they focus their attention on multiple possible
narrative endings. They become mentally involved as
they picture themselves in the scene of the events and
construct vivid imagery regarding the narrative setting
and characters. They are emotionally impacted as they
connect with the plot and characters. In this section,
we focus on several key mechanisms that elicit trans-
portation: suspense, perceived realism, emotional flow,
and enjoyment.12
Suspense. Narrative often deals with the vicissitudes of
human life (for reviews, see Busselle & Greenberg, 2000;
Potter, 1988). The suspense elicited by this captures the
audience’s attention.13 Suspense refers to the feeling of
being excited or uncertain about what comes next, in
anticipation of the outcome of the plot. There are several
kinds of suspense: In one, the story outcome is unknown,
and suspense is elicited by anticipation of who, what, or
how; in another, the outcome is known because of pre-
ceding events, and suspense is elicited by the anticipa-
tion of when (Harmon, 2010). In other words, suspense
can be invoked when the audience is deeply curious
about what will happen next because they do not know
the ending or when they know the ending but do not
know how or when it will happen (Hoeken & van Vliet,
2000).
Perceived realism. Another mechanism for transporta-
tion, perceived realism, captures the audience’s judgment
that the narrative world reflects the actual world; realism
can directly impact positive evaluation of a story’s mes-
sage by influencing whether the narrative seems reason-
able (Cho etal., 2014). People are thought to be concerned
with the perceived realism of a particular fictional con-
text over and above the literal truth (Graesser et al.,
2002). An audience may regard a story as unrealistic and
confusing if the story world unnecessarily diverges from
the actual world (e.g., humans have six arms without
context) or the story seems incoherent (e.g., a character’s
name changes without reason).
Cho et al. (2014) propose five characteristics of per-
ceived realism. The first is plausibility, whether the story
events portrayed could happen in the real world. The
second is typicality, whether events are within the audi-
ence’s set of past experiences. Factuality refers to how
much a narrative is perceived as portraying a specific
individual or event in the real world. Quality refers to
the degree to which the audio, visual, and other manu-
factured elements of a narrative evoke a convincing and
Psychological Science in the Public Interest 23(3) 113
compelling portrayal of reality, independent of whether
the content of the narrative is related or relevant to the
audience’s real-world experience. Finally, perceived nar-
rative consistency denotes the degree to which story
elements are judged to be congruent, coherent, and free
from contradictions.
To illustrate, in one study, the protagonist in a story
was described as lacking the ability to turn invisible
but then disappeared (Walsh etal., 2018). Participants’
comprehension of the narrative was disrupted because
the story’s fantasy context (i.e., that the character lacks
the power of invisibility) and their general world
knowledge (i.e., that people cannot turn invisible) were
inconsistent with the target event (i.e., disappear-
ing). Similarly, in a different study, anomalous passages
(e.g., “Robert used a radio to play the horrible mouse”)
tended to be more difficult to comprehend than implau-
sible passages (e.g., “Robert used a hook to catch the
horrible mouse”) and control passages (e.g., “Robert
used a trap to catch the horrible mouse”; Joseph etal.,
2008).
Emotional involvement, flow, and enjoyment. Emo-
tional involvement is another key feature of transporta-
tion.14 Stories can act as a platform for people to suspend
disbelief and vicariously pursue intense emotional
journeys—they can make people burst into tears, cackle
with laughter, or nervously slide back and forth in their
seat, hoping for an alleviating turn of events (Nabi &
Green, 2015). Emotions can immerse the audience in the
plot to such an extent that they lose touch with their sur-
roundings (Green etal., 2004). Evidence for the mediat-
ing role of emotion in narrative can be seen in a study by
Morgan et al. (2009), which found that emotional involve-
ment predicted beliefs about organ donation. Participants
watched six episodes with organ donation storylines in
four acclaimed U.S. television dramas (CSI: NY, Numb3rs,
House, and Grey’s Anatomy). Greater emotional involve-
ment was associated with stronger belief in the impor-
tance of organ donation, stronger perceived empowerment
of other viewers to become donors, and participants’
beliefs that they had learned new facts about donation.
Emotions also help audiences comprehend story
events. When consuming narratives, audiences regularly
assume the perspective of the characters and mentally
represent the characters’ emotional states as their own
(Mar & Oatley, 2008). Such self-referent emotions are
among the most direct means by which stories impact
comprehension and motivation (Dunlop etal., 2008).
Mentally representing the emotional states of characters
requires that the audience can identify characters’ goals
to guide interpretation of conflict and resolution in the
plot (Oatley, 1999). In this vein, Levine and Pizarro
(2004) suggest that emotions arise from event appraisal
relative to the status of some goal. Positively valenced
emotions (e.g., happiness) tend to be experienced
when goals succeed and problem solving is no longer
necessary. By contrast, negatively valenced emotions
(e.g., sadness) emerge when goals have failed and there
is a problem to solve.
Building on emotional involvement, emotional flow
is another mechanism for transportation. Emotional
flow refers to emotional shifts from positive to negative
(e.g., happiness to sadness), from negative to positive
(e.g., fear to relief), or from one state to another of the
analogous valence (e.g., happiness to pride or fear to
anger; Nabi & Green, 2015). The literature points to
story structure as a key driver of emotional flow and
transportation. Emotional flow is elicited by the dyna-
mism of stories, produced by environmental and char-
acter changes, which take the audience on a journey
through the ups and downs of the plot, including fail-
ures and successes. The plot defines the problem,
establishing cause and effect between events that
underly emotional shifts.
Narratives tend to converge on particular patterns of
emotional flow. To illustrate, one study quantified the
emotional peaks and valleys of more than 1,700 digi-
tized novels and other texts (Reagan etal., 2016). Analy-
sis revealed six essential emotional arcs that correspond
to various plot archetypes: (a) rags to riches (rise); (b)
tragedy, or riches to rags (fall); (c) man in a hole (fall-
rise); (d) Icarus (rise-fall); (e) Cinderella (rise-fall-rise);
and (f) Oedipus (fall-rise-fall). The tendency to con-
struct plots that yield recognizable emotional arcs
underscores the delicate balance between uncertainty
and predictability. To this effect, age-old fairy tales,
such as Cinderella and Little Red Riding Hood, have
recognizable emotional arcs that have persisted despite
variation in population histories and geographical dis-
tances across hundreds of years (Graça da Silva & Tehrani,
2016; Tehrani, 2013).
Another driver of emotional flow and heightened
transportation is hedonic desire—people seek out mes-
sages that alter negative moods as well as maintain and
prolong positive ones; this hedonic desire moves the
audience to alternate between fear and hope as events
progress in the story to make the protagonist’s goal
more or less likely to succeed. This culminates in the
cathartic experience of relief when the protagonist
overcomes their obstacle. Hedonic desire generates
postmessage transportation by driving people to seek
more information, repeated exposure, recall, and social
sharing. Negative information at an event boundary
guides the audience to prioritize anticipation as they
seek to shift their mood (Nabi & Green, 2015). Emo-
tional flow can be so effective that even when a story
outcome is unambiguously favorable, relief (negative
114 Walsh et al.
to positive) mediates the effect of suspense on enjoy-
ment (Madrigal etal., 2011). In one study, participants
viewed film excerpts with multiple emotional shifts,
wherein negative outcomes were emphasized (Bezdek
& Gerrig, 2017). Attentional capture was measured by
the participants’ reaction time to audio probes—lower
reaction times conveyed greater transportation (i.e.,
failure to attend to external stimuli). Participants missed
more probes and were slower to react during suspense-
ful scenes that signaled an upcoming emotional shift.
Thus far, we have considered how emotional involve-
ment and flow work to enhance transportation. Yet
another emotional driver of transportation is enjoyment,
which refers to “a perception of great pleasure and
happiness brought on by success in or simple satisfac-
tion with an activity” (APA Dictionary of Psychology,
2023).15 Nabi and Krcmar (2004) theorize that enjoy-
ment comprises three dimensions that mutually rein-
force one another to drive narrative consumption and
transportation. The affective component relates to emo-
tional flow, involving gratification-seeking and hedo-
nistic desire as people ride the ups and downs of the
narrative arc. The cognitive component involves judg-
ments of characters’ actions, whether positive or nega-
tive, as well as judgments about the story content more
broadly (e.g., perceived realism, story coherence, message
quality) or personal evaluations (e.g., relevance, similar-
ity). Finally, the behavioral component relates to selective
exposure to the narrative based on the act of processing
the narrative itself (e.g., reading vs. watching).
One way that enjoyment is relevant is through its
ability to counteract the effects of fear (Moyer-Gusé,
2008). Often, communication that elicits high levels of
fear discourages audiences from considering the mes-
sage. This results in selective avoidance and story-
inconsistent attitudes and behaviors (Moyer-Gusé,
2008). However, when a story is so enjoyable that it
transports people into the story world, the audience
often willingly experiences intense arousal, anxiety, and
fear because the audience expects that the narrative
will have an entertaining payoff (Zillmann, 1996). For
example, people might enjoy the drama of thrillers or
the visual effects of horror movies.
When people consume stories for enjoyment, they
process information differently from when they con-
sume information with the intention of learning. This
can be seen in the results from a study that examined
the effect of a biographical film on attitudes toward a
political candidate (Weber & Wirth, 2014). Using voice-
over narration, the study varied how a political candi-
date was portrayed (mildly positive vs. dramatically,
exaggeratedly positive). The study also varied each
participant’s motivation by giving them different
instructions before the film began (to learn vs. to enjoy).
Exaggerated portrayals yielded more favorable attitudes
toward the candidate when the film was processed for
enjoyment but not when processed for learning. The
audience apparently tolerated story exaggerations less
during didactic story comprehension because dramatic
story content did not match their intention to learn.
Identification
Good stories connect audiences to their characters
(Cohen, 2001).16 This happens in several ways. First,
people project the self onto the represented characters,
a process termed mentalizing (Mar & Oatley, 2008).
This enables people to take a character-oriented per-
spective, forming a bond between audience and char-
acters (Murphy etal., 2011). The bond also guides the
audience’s emotional response to events within the story:
developing empathic feelings, understanding the char-
acter’s motives, adopting the character’s goals (Cohen
etal., 2018), and unconsciously copying the behavior
of the characters they observe (Lee & Shapiro, 2016).
As characters push the plot forward, they increase the
audience’s investment in narrative outcomes. Hence,
well-fleshed-out narratives include intriguing characters
with whom the audience can identify: Victims who suffer,
villains who inflict harm, and heroes who vindicate the
victims and avenge the villains. The best-documented
ways to elicit identification appear to be based on char-
acters’ perceived likeability (Robinson & Knobloch-
Westerwick, 2017), similarity (Cohen et al., 2018;
Hoeken etal., 2016), and point of view—that is, whose
perspective guides the storytelling (de Graaf etal., 2012).
Likeability. Likeability is one known driver of identifi-
cation (Robinson & Knobloch-Westerwick, 2017). Liking
simply refers to positive evaluations of a character
(Cohen, 2001). People seem to evaluate the likeability of
media characters in much the same way they evaluate
real people in their social networks (Mar & Oatley, 2008).
That is, the audience assesses characters’ personality
traits, developing impressions and expectations of char-
acters’ behaviors. This increases the audience’s invest-
ment in the plot—people fear negative outcomes and
hope for positive outcomes for liked characters and
experience the converse for disliked characters (Zillmann
& Vorderer, 2000).
One way to increase the likeability of characters is
to provide recognizable features that cue schemas sug-
gesting the characters’ morality (Krakowiak & Oliver,
2012; Tamborini etal., 2010). For instance, in one
experiment (Grizzard etal., 2018), people interpreted
visual cues about characters on the basis of schemas
Psychological Science in the Public Interest 23(3) 115
about heroes and villains (e.g., “ugly” villains dressed
in dark clothes vs. “handsome” heroes dressed in pale
clothes). This allowed participants to evoke character-
consistent moral judgments even without reading about
concrete behavior, characters behaving like a villain by
doing harm, or characters behaving like a hero by help-
ing. Moreover, the study found that character-schema
activation was magnified by the presence of an oppos-
ing character (e.g., villain vs. hero), altering subsequent
moral judgments of characters. The implication is that
there is great power in suggestive cues to encourage
the audience to imaginatively flesh out characters.
Nice characters are not always the most liked or most
likely to yield identification; people are also attracted
to negative characters (Hoffner & Buchanan, 2005). For
example, moral, immoral, and morally ambiguous char-
acters can influence audience responses in different
ways. Krakowiak and Oliver (2012) found that good
characters are well liked and thoroughly transporting.
Morally ambiguous characters, in contrast, are liked less
than good characters, but they are nevertheless equally
as transporting, suspense inducing, cognitively engag-
ing, and thereby enjoyable. The authors found that bad
characters were liked the least but were equally as
transporting, suspenseful, and thus cognitively engag-
ing. Krakowiak and Oliver suggest that the audience
may base their likeability of characters on the ratio
of good to bad things that they do, particularly when
lacking other information. In turn, this impacts
identification.
Point of view. The narrative’s point of view refers to the
perspective from which the story is told, whether first
person, second person, or third person. Oatley (1999)
suggests three reasons why point of view is crucial for
identification. First, fiction involves mental simulation of
other people’s minds, wherein coherence is determined
by personal truths that come from a certain character’s
perspective. As people simulate the experience of char-
acters, the point of view provides scaffolding to connect
to the character. Second, narratives have a constructive
nature that does not always provide a faithful rendering
of the events. It therefore matters for interpretation which
ground truth is highlighted. Third, narratives enable peo-
ple to conceive and understand goals, which necessarily
relies on the point of view of the characters.
One of the main ways that point of view generates
identification is to decrease the perceived cognitive
distance between the audience and the character. Spe-
cifically, a first-person perspective helps the audience
identify more strongly with the character’s experiences,
aligning the audience’s feelings and attitudes with those
of the narrator. Evidence for this comes from a series
of experiments (de Graaf etal., 2012) that manipulated
identification by varying story point of view. All par-
ticipants read a narrative about a job interview for the
position of web designer. One group read the version
told from the applicant’s perspective. A second group
read the version told from the perspective of the pro-
grammer who was hiring on behalf of an employer.
Identification with the applicant mediated the effect of
perspective on positive attitudes toward the employer.
In a follow-up experiment, the narrative was about two
sisters considering euthanasia for their mother, who
had been in an irreversible coma for more than a
month. Participants who read the story told from the
perspective of the character against euthanasia identi-
fied more strongly with that character and held a less
favorable posttest attitude toward considering euthana-
sia, compared with participants who read the story told
from the perspective of the character who supported
euthanasia.
Similarity. Perceived similarity refers to how much the
audience perceives that they resemble a story character.
Similarity can refer to physical attributes, demographic
variables, beliefs, personality, or values (Cohen et al.,
2018). A long-standing body of work posits that people
are attracted to others who have similar identities and
espouse similar attitudes (i.e., “birds of a feather flock
together”; Byrne, 1971; Montoya et al., 2008). Other
research supports this idea, finding that identification
does correlate with self-reported perceived similarity
(e.g., Hoffner & Buchanan, 2005). Similarity may also
mediate romantic attraction to fictional characters, termed
parasocial attraction (Andsager et al., 2006; Pinkleton
et al., 2010). Although extensive research predicts that
(demographic) similarity should predict identification
(see Cohen etal., 2018, p. 508, for a review), more recent
work has shown that basic demographic markers alone
are insufficient to elicit identification (Cohen etal., 2018,
Studies 1 and 2).
A well-documented way to elicit identification via
similarity is to include self-referential details in stories;
people preferentially identify with characters who
appear not only similar but also relevant to themselves.
For example, in one study (de Graaf, 2014), participants
read a story in which the protagonist had either the
same living arrangements as themselves or different
arrangements (living with parents vs. in student hous-
ing). Participants with similar living arrangements dis-
played more story-consistent beliefs than participants
with dissimilar arrangements. Yet this effect depended
on whether readers related the story to themselves, not
just identification with the protagonist. Equally, young
participants who read a health testimonial identified
more strongly with a young protagonist of the same
gender than with an older protagonist of the opposite
116 Walsh et al.
gender, but only when self-referencing mediated the
effect (M. Chen etal., 2016).
Meaning making
Meaning making describes how people extrapolate
from the causal models embedded in the story to their
own decision problems. Stories facilitate meaning mak-
ing by supporting encoding of ideas and processing of
important connections (i.e., causal junctures). Stories
organize complex information into simplified causal
structures. These are called schemas and scripts (W. F.
Brewer & Lichtenstein, 1980). Schemas are general men-
tal representations, depicting a concept’s parts and the
relationship between the parts (Mandler & Johnson,
1977). Scripts are a related construct that convey tem-
poral sequencing. They contain procedural knowledge
about how events unfold: what happens and in what
order (Schank & Abelson, 1977). Schemas and scripts
are integral to narrative comprehension because people
do not typically remember a narrative verbatim. Rather,
they use schemas to retrieve the gist of the plot. One
benefit of this is that people can flexibly recover infor-
mation generalizing across other stories, subjects, and
modalities (Baldassano etal., 2017).
For example, a children’s book may tell the story of
a girl genius. After receiving admiration and attention
from the adults in her life, she becomes hubristic and
takes her friends for granted. Eventually, she realizes
that her newfound self-confidence is in fact arrogance
and has pushed her friends away. Her experience of
loneliness forces her to see the error of her ways and
she sincerely apologizes to her friends. Children read-
ing this story can derive several sources of meaning.
One is that hubris, though enticing, can isolate you
from your friends. Another is that heartfelt apologies
can be a path to redemption. These sequences of events
are causally related, providing a practical schema that
children can use to guide their social interactions. The
schemas are not always obvious or explicit. Children
are most effective at extracting these moral stories
when prompted to explicitly explain the causal models
embedded in the stories (Walker & Lombrozo, 2017).
Encoding. Encoding describes the conversion of infor-
mation into representations that can be stored in the
mind and recalled later from long-term memory (Goldstein,
2014). Schemas help people efficiently encode stories by
providing preprogrammed structures in which novel
information can be situated (Mandler & Johnson, 1977).
This also facilitates retrieval (Black & Bern, 1981). Once
a schema is cued, people regularly fill in the gaps with
general knowledge or stereotypes without referencing
the actual story (Schank & Abelson, 1977). For example,
mentioning a restaurant automatically cues behavioral
scripts related to dining, such as using cutlery and order-
ing from a menu, before the audience even encounters
these concepts in the text. The importance of schemas
for encoding is evident when stories violate expectations
(Mandler & Johnson, 1977): Just the right amount of vio-
lation can heighten encoding because the audience tries
to make sense of an unexpected event. By contrast, with-
out any violation, the story is entirely predictable, not
requiring encoding of diagnostic events for meaning
making. Equally, too many violations can lead to confu-
sion as the audience struggles to understand even basic
story features (Barrett & Nyhof, 2001).
Another feature of stories that affects people’s capac-
ity to encode is the cohesiveness of the narrative’s
sequence. Well-organized events (e.g., beginning, mid-
dle, end) help the audience to understand how the
story hangs together. The temporal connection between
events helps people identify their underlying causal
association: which events are connected or distinct,
which are causal or peripheral (Kintsch, 1998). In turn,
causally connected events have stronger associations
at encoding (Black & Bern, 1981). To determine whether
events are causally connected, the audience processes
narrative text sentence by sentence, enabling them to
observe which sentences refer to the same concepts
and objects (i.e., establish referential relations). These
relations signal associations between events, establish
consistency, and facilitate detection of violations or
anomalies (Joseph etal., 2008). Indeed, causal coher-
ence is one reason why narratives are more readily
recalled than expository information.
To illustrate, in one experiment, participants read
narratives, then saw sentences from those narratives
and tried to recall the sentences that came immediately
after (Black & Bern, 1981). In a second experiment,
participants engaged in free recall of the same narra-
tives without cuing. In both experiments, recall was
better when the two sentences were causally related.
In free response, participants were more likely to recall
two causally related sentences as one unit (as measured
by conjunctions or summary statements). If one sen-
tence was recalled, so was the other, and participants
explicitly marked the connection between the sen-
tences. These findings suggest that as the audience
encodes one sentence, that sentence serves as a mem-
ory cue for encoding of the next one.
Causal junctures. Causal junctures aid meaning mak-
ing because they leverage the causal logic of the story to
convey which information is valuable and show possible
ways to make sense of the story world (Dahlstrom, 2010).
Psychological Science in the Public Interest 23(3) 117
To investigate how the presentation of causal junctures
affects the audience’s experience of stories, Knobloch
et al. (2004) varied the attributes of stories that partici-
pants read, including the story’s causal chain (i.e., linear
vs. reversed [out of order] vs. inverted [outcomes featured
first]) and factuality (i.e., high [news reports] vs. low
[novel excerpts]). The linear organization of events
increased audience suspense while the reversed organi-
zation of events elicited more curiosity. Equally, the linear
and reversed stories both produced greater reading
enjoyment than the inverted story. These effects were
independent of the factuality of media content, under-
scoring the value of meaningful connections between
events. Indeed, the findings correspond with neural work
showing that even the emotional experience of suspense
depends on brain areas associated with predictive infer-
ence: Order helps people anticipate causal junctures at
future event points (Lehne etal., 2015).
Another way that causal junctures drive meaning
making is by indicating which information is relevant
(Sloman, 2005). That is, causal junctures mark cause-
and-effect relations between events, indicating which
story elements are most likely to affect upcoming
events. In one study (Dahlstrom, 2010), scientific asser-
tions placed at causal locations of a narrative resulted
in greater levels of acceptance of information than the
same assertions placed at noncausal locations within
the same narrative. Specifically, the information at
causal locations was perceived as more truthful in the
real world than the same information placed at non-
causal locations. In a related finding, causally related
events had greater impact when located at the begin-
ning of the story, possibly because people dedicate
more intense cognitive processing to anticipate the plot
(Dahlstrom, 2012). Thus, it may be optimal to frame the
sense of the story or convey more complex information
at the beginning of the story, where story content
receives most cognitive processing.
In summary, stories impact their audiences through
three main mechanisms. First, stories are impactful
when they transport people into the story world, cap-
turing their attention and engaging them emotionally.
Stories tend to transport people when they are sus-
penseful, when they are perceived to be realistic, and
when they get the audience emotionally involved or
interested. Second, stories are impactful when they lead
people to identify with their characters. Three factors
that matter for eliciting identification are likeability, the
narrator’s point of view, and similarity. Third, stories
have impact when their audiences are able to extract
meaning from them. This means they can apply insights
from the story to other contexts. People are best able
to do this when the meaning, or schema, is easy to
encode and when it is placed at causal junctures.
The Functions of Stories
Stories have served a social function for thousands of
years. Today, they aid a diverse array of goals—teaching
children to read, persuading people to have safer sex,
and inculcating national myths that bring polities
together. This section brings these applications together
under three headings: learning, persuasion, and collec-
tive action. Learning refers to how stories extend social
learning and aid teaching. Persuasion describes how
stories change people’s attitudes and beliefs by reduc-
ing reactance, conveying causal models, and facilitating
vicarious engagement. And collective action relates to
how stories address social dilemmas and coordination
problems by establishing common knowledge, expecta-
tions, explanations, reputations, and shared identities.
Learning
From early childhood, a central way people learn about
the world is through story.17 People use stories to teach
children how to read (Price & Kalil, 2019), as scaffold-
ing to impart lessons on norms and morality (Baumeister
etal., 2004; Walker & Lombrozo, 2017), and to explain
how the natural world works (Dahlstrom, 2014). Stories
are key to at least two information transmission pro-
cesses: social learning and teaching. Social learning
describes how people acquire knowledge through
observation or interaction with other agents (Heyes,
2018). Stories extend social learning by enabling people
to learn from others without directly observing the
behavior (Baumeister etal., 2004). Teaching describes
how a knowledgeable person intentionally facilitates
the acquisition of information by a naive pupil (Galef
& Whiten, 2017).18 Stories enable teaching by engaging
their pupils and communicating causal models of the
world.
Social learning. People learn to solve problems in two
basic ways that are relevant here. One is trial-and-error
learning. Imagine learning how to ride a bike. The other
is social learning. People develop a vast array of their
capabilities through the process of social learning
(Henrich, 2017; Herrmann et al., 2007; Heyes, 2018;
Tomasello, 1999). This is a key determinant of historical
evolution and persistence (Henrich, 2020; Laland, 2018;
Mesoudi, 2011; Nunn, 2020; Richerson & Boyd, 2005).
Social learning was first theorized in detail by Albert Ban-
dura in his work on aggression (Bandura, 1977). In Ban-
dura’s original social learning paradigm, schoolchildren
observed an adult model’s aggressive behavior toward a
doll, a sequence that had certain storylike qualities. The
children subsequently imitated the behavior of the adults.
These experiments set the stage for understanding the
118 Walsh et al.
much larger impact of social learning on behavior via
goal pursuit, self-efficacy, and skill development.
One kind of social learning is observational learning.
This describes an audience seeing others receive
rewards and punishment for different actions and then
flexibly shaping their own behavior on the basis of the
observed strategies (Bandura, 1986).19 For example, one
might see an older cousin take on a peculiar extracur-
ricular activity and gain admittance to a high-quality
university, then decide to take on that extracurricular
activity oneself. Stories enable people to mentalize
these experiences without ever having the actual social
referents (Bandura, 2006; Baumeister etal., 2004). For
example, one study tested whether watching the movie
Queen of Katwe led Ugandan school children to per-
form better on their national exams (Riley, 2022). The
movie depicts the struggle of a 10-year-old girl, Phiona,
and her family, who live in poverty in the capital, Kam-
pala. Her world is transformed when she meets a mis-
sionary who teaches her how to play chess. She soon
discovers she is exceptionally talented, and her success
in competitions enables her to escape poverty and buy
a home for her family. Simply watching the movie
improved both girls’ and boys’ performance in exams
(compared with a placebo), but the effects were largest
for girls. Girls were also more likely to continue their
school after the exam; the movie entirely eliminated
the gender gap in admittance to university.
The idea of stories as observational learning has
motivated policy researchers to create narrative movies
aimed at facilitating learning. In another study, a team
of development economists traveled to rural parts of
Ethiopia where people were living in poverty and had
limited or no access to television. In randomly selected
villages, they organized screenings of documentary-
style stories depicting similar families getting ahead
economically by working hard and making good finan-
cial decisions. The characters in the documentaries
started businesses, diversified their income streams, and
improved their farming practices. By setting goals and
working toward achieving them, the protagonists
improved their economic lot in life. The villagers who
watched the documentaries were more likely to save
money, use credit, enroll their children in school, and
financially invest in their children’s education (Tanguy
etal., 2014).
Observational learning is not mere imitation. The
audience makes inferences about costs and benefits of
actions on the basis of the model’s experience. Thus,
stories may also lead people away from the behaviors
they see modeled. An example of this is the impact of
MTV’s television show 16 and Pregnant on rates of teen
childbearing (Kearney & Levine, 2015). In a particular
region, an association was found between viewership
of the show and changes in teen childbearing rates,
suggesting that the show reduced teen births. To test
whether the relationship was causal, the researchers
employed an instrumental-variable strategy using local-
area MTV ratings data to predict local 16 and Pregnant
ratings. The authors suggest that pregnancy rates may
have fallen because of increased use of contraception
and abortion, citing data from Google Trends and Twit-
ter showing that the show increased interest in these
search terms.
Stories are particularly helpful in learning how to
navigate the social world (Dodell-Feder & Tamir, 2018;
Mar, 2011; Mar & Oatley, 2008; Mar etal., 2006, 2009;
Oatley, 1999; Tamir etal., 2015). Fictional stories simu-
late interactive experiences, activating parts of the brain
used for social cognition (Tamir etal., 2015) and pro-
viding models of coordination (Mar & Oatley, 2008).
They lay out the dynamics of human conflict. They
describe the desires, frustrations, and obsessions of
their protagonists. They portray acts of courage and
betrayal. As people entertain fictional simulations again
and again through the books they read and the shows
they watch, people practice social interaction and
develop more refined expectations for how social inter-
actions play out (Oatley, 2016). One study (Mar etal.,
2006) looked at whether different types of reading (i.e.,
fiction vs. nonfiction) predicted capabilities in social
cognition. Reading more fiction predicted better social
capabilities. In research on the short-term effects of
reading fiction, participants were randomly assigned to
a narrative condition, where they read stories, or to a
control condition, where they read nonfiction or do
nothing. The results were mixed. Some studies have
found that reading fiction improves sociocognitive abili-
ties (Kidd & Castano, 2013; Pino & Mazza, 2016). Other
studies have found no effects (Panero etal., 2016;
Samur etal., 2018). A meta-analysis of the relationship,
examining evidence from 14 studies, found that these
results are significant but small (Dodell-Feder & Tamir,
2018).
Stories may be effective social learning strategies for
at least two reasons. The first is model availability (i.e.,
whom to observe). People are strategic social learners—
they are highly selective in deciding whom to learn
from (Hoppitt & Laland, 2013; Laland, 2004; Rendell
etal., 2011). The advantage of stories is that they depict
events that people rarely observe in ordinary life. For
example, they might depict how a divorce plays out
(an event that often happens privately) or how a person
trains for a marathon (often alone, over time). The
second is that stories are focal points for social coordi-
nation. Groups are capable of settling on a diverse set
of social norms and moral lessons. The important con-
sideration for group cohesion is not only the particular
Psychological Science in the Public Interest 23(3) 119
moral lessons learned but also the fact that everybody
learns the same one. When people learn from the same
stories, they converge on shared understandings.
Teaching. Stories are also important for teaching. A
large literature shows that children whose parents read to
them when they are babies and preschoolers are better
able to read later (Bus etal., 1995). Historically, much of
this research has been correlational. The large and wid-
ening class gaps in the time parents spend on develop-
mental activities with their children (Altintas, 2016) create
a risk that the association between reading to children
and their cognitive development may be driven by other
factors (such as financial resources). Some recent studies
have been designed to address this. One study (Price &
Kalil, 2019) undertook different methodological appro-
aches to control for confounds. The study found that an
increase in reading time (of 1 standard deviation)
increased children’s reading achievement (by 0.8 stan-
dard deviations). One explanation why stories may be so
key to learning how to read is that they are significantly
easier to understand and remember than comparable
forms of information. A recent meta-analysis by Mar and
colleagues (2021), which examined 75 samples from
more than 33,000 participants, found that people are sig-
nificantly better at understanding and remembering sto-
ries than essays.
Stories are used to teach children other core skills,
too. An example is the show Sesame Street (Kearney &
Levine, 2019; Mares & Pan, 2013). Sesame Street focuses
on teaching children how to be smarter, stronger, and
kinder. The show began in the late 1960s with the goal
of tackling educational inequality based on differences
in access to quality preschool for disadvantaged chil-
dren. It quickly became enormously popular. Scholars
estimated that approximately a third of children in the
United States between the ages of 2 and 5 watched the
show in the early 1970s (about the same proportion of
the U.S. population watches the Super Bowl today).
Because of its reach, the show was radically more cost
effective than other early childhood interventions. Early
evidence from randomized trials revealed that the show
had a significant and immediate impact on literacy and
numeracy among children between 3 and 4 years old.
The effects were comparable with those found in early
Head Start evaluations (summarized by Kearney &
Levine, 2019). Sesame Street has now been running for
more than 50 years and is broadcast all around the
world. A review of the impacts of the show in 15 coun-
tries, examining more than 10,000 children across 24
studies, found that the program had a significant posi-
tive effect on numeracy, literacy, health and safety
knowledge, and social cognition (Mares & Pan, 2013).
An analysis of the effects of broadcasting in the early
1970s (Kearney & Levine, 2019) examined variation in
access to the show to estimate the effects, which were
largest for children from disadvantaged neighborhoods
as well as for boys and Black children. The show cost
only $5 per child in 2019 dollars.
Stories play a role in teaching information to adults—
this is sometimes called entertainment education
(Singhal etal., 2003; Singhal & Rogers, 2012, 2002) or
infotainment. One area of focus is financial literacy. In
one study, researchers looked at the effect of embed-
ding educational messages about debt management and
gambling in a soap opera. The show featured a pro-
tagonist who borrows too much, gambles, and falls into
a debt trap. Eventually, she seeks help to get out of her
situation and manages debt responsibly. To test the
effect of the show, the researchers (Berg & Zia, 2017)
offered financial incentives as encouragement for two
groups: One group watched Scandal (the show with
the storyline about debt), and the other watched
Muvhango (which screened at the same time). The
overwhelming majority of the participants watched the
shows they were assigned (< 12% of the control group
watched Scandal). The researchers found that the show
significantly increased financial knowledge, the use of
borrowing through formal channels, and borrowing for
productive purposes. The Scandal group were also sig-
nificantly less likely to gamble. Focus groups indicated
that the Scandal group emotionally connected with the
protagonist and saw her make the kinds of decisions
they might aspire to make.
Persuasion
Narratives are also used to change attitudes, beliefs, and
behaviors. Learning and persuasion differ in locus of
control. Learning is about developing personal agency—
the ability to “intentionally make things happen by one’s
actions” (Bandura, 2001, p. 2). Greater agency means
having more and better options to choose from or the
ability to select between preferred choices at low cogni-
tive cost. When people recover generalizable informa-
tion from a story, through either observational learning
or teaching, they enhance their capabilities and are bet-
ter able to intentionally make things happen through
their actions. Persuasion, on the other hand, is about
influencing the beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors of other
people. Persuasion may take a central route, where the
target scrutinizes the merits of the information, or a
peripheral route, where the target is influenced by
superficial cues (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986), but the goal
of persuasion is the same. When a story is used to per-
suade, the teller aims to affect the audience’s attitudes,
beliefs, or courses of action. The locus of control lies
with the persuader, not the audience.
120 Walsh et al.
Persuasion is widely used by policymakers around
the world, though stories do not feature centrally in
this work. In the field known as nudging (Thaler &
Sunstein, 2008), governments create choice architecture
that guides people to pay their taxes, encourages peo-
ple to undertake healthy behaviors, and fosters more
inclusive attitudes toward historically stigmatized
groups. Many applications of persuasion have a pater-
nalistic rationale (Thaler & Sunstein, 2003). For exam-
ple, public health workers who want young adults to
adopt safer sexual practices, such as using a condom,
undertake this action because they believe that the
targets of the policy will be better off as a result (Banerjee
et al., 2019). Persuasion can also be a more cost-
effective way to motivate action than legal punishment.
For example, governments nudge people to pay their
taxes as a compliment to traditional (more expensive)
law-enforcement methods (Hallsworth etal., 2017). In
these cases, the government would be acting in accor-
dance with the law if it punished tax avoiders. Finally,
the government may seek to instill civic virtues: atti-
tudes, beliefs, and behaviors that are neither strictly in
a person’s private material interest nor legally required.
For example, government agencies may seek to dis-
courage racist or sexist attitudes, or they may seek to
encourage people to act prosocially within their com-
munity (Blair etal., 2019).20
There is a long-standing literature on narrative per-
suasion not just in social psychology but also in fields
related to policy: communication (Braddock & Dillard,
2016; de Graaf etal., 2016; Moyer-Gusé, 2008; Moyer-
Gusé & Nabi, 2010) and public health (Hinyard &
Kreuter, 2007; Orozco-Olvera etal., 2019; Shen etal.,
2015). Narratives have also been used to understand
policy challenges such as intergroup conflict (Paluck,
2009; Tal-Or & Tsfati, 2016), outgroup prejudice (P. J.
Johnson & Aboud, 2017; D. R. Johnson etal., 2013;
Martinez etal., 2021; Moyer-Gusé etal., 2019), climate
action (Morris etal., 2019), and trust in government
(Trujillo & Paluck, 2012).
Attitudes and beliefs. Persuasion is first and foremost
about changing people’s attitudes (Crano & Prislin, 2006)
and beliefs (Kamenica, 2019). Attitudes describe how
people evaluate targets with favor or disfavor (Eagly &
Chaiken, 1993, p. 1). The target that people form attitudes
about could be anything—actions, a group of people, or
even the self. Beliefs, on the other hand, are expectations
about the likelihood of different states of the world (Fishbein
& Ajzen, 1975; Manski, 2004; Ramsey, 1931/2016). Atti-
tudes and beliefs matter for policy for several reasons,
the main one being that, under certain circumstances,
they predict behavior. In their work on behavioral
change, Fishbein and Ajzen (2010) model attitudes
(alongside the person’s perception of social norms and
behavioral control) as one of three psychological vari-
ables that determine behavioral intentions, the primary
antecedent of behavior. They propose that beliefs, in
turn, determine each of these variables. Policymakers
may also be concerned with attitudes and beliefs for their
own sake. For example, they may be concerned about
the spread of fake news, the prevalence of prejudice or
hate, general levels of distrust, or people’s mental health,
viewed as their attitude toward themselves and their
lives.
A powerful example of the capacity for stories to
navigate sensitive and complex social attitudes comes
from a remarkable study on female genital cutting. In
Sudan, female genital cutting is prevalent, but social
attitudes vary within communities (Efferson et al.,
2015). In one study (Vogt etal., 2016), a series of mov-
ies portrayed the local variation in views on cutting.
The movies depicted an extended family in a rural part
of Sudan—parents, grandparents, children, and other
relatives—and contained intrigue, deception, love, and
forgiveness. The treatment conditions were embedded
in a subplot in which characters have a disagreement
in relation to cutting. One subplot focused on argu-
ments about cutting, purity, health, and religious values.
Another subplot focused on the effect of cutting on
young women’s marital prospects. The movies signifi-
cantly improved viewers’ implicit attitudes toward uncut
girls compared with a control movie (which had no
discussion of cutting). And the movie that combined
both subplots had relatively persistent effects.
The best holistic assessment of the effect of narrative
persuasion comes from a meta-analysis of 76 studies
conducted between 1983 and 2013, which found that
narrative interventions have a significant effect on atti-
tudes and beliefs (Braddock & Dillard, 2016). There are
several explanations for the persuasive effects of nar-
rative: They reduce reactance, they supply causal infor-
mation, and they expose their audiences to vicarious
experiences.
How stories persuade. The first way in which stories
persuade is that they reduce reactance (Moyer-Gusé,
2008; Slater & Rouner, 2002). Reactance describes audi-
ences feeling that a message threatens their freedom or
pressures them to change. This experience may lead peo-
ple to be more likely to counterargue (Brehm & Brehm,
2013). Stories can be designed to reduce counterarguing
by embedding persuasive messaging in an engaging plot
without making the audience feel that they are the target
of the message. For example, a story may include a plot
in which one character is about to make a bad health
Psychological Science in the Public Interest 23(3) 121
choice and another pleads with them to consider the
consequences. In doing so, the story exposes the audi-
ence to the argument without ever making them feel that
the story is explicitly seeking to persuade them. In turn,
the audience may also focus on how the recipient of the
message responds within the story. A recent meta-
analysis found that narratives were more effective than
nonnarrative persuasion at reducing counterarguing and
that story engagement (discussed in an earlier section)
predicted the degree of counterarguing (Ratcliff & Sun,
2020).
Second, stories represent causal relations that peo-
ple then use to make sense of the world (Dahlstrom,
2010; Eliaz & Spiegler, 2020; Kendall & Charles, 2022).
For example, a fictional story about corporate lawyers
may describe how the characters, employed at top law
firms, got their jobs through connections rather than
grades. The audience, aware that the story is fictional,
knows that this information does not pertain to actual
events that happened. Nevertheless, the causal model
embedded in the narrative (connections lead to job
offers) may lead the audience (e.g., prospective law
students) to update their beliefs about how they should
spend their time at law school. The persuasive feature
of the story in this pathway is not the information con-
tained within the story but the mental model that offers
a new way to organize existing information (Schwartzstein
& Sunderam, 2021; Trabasso & van den Broek, 1985).
Third, stories facilitate vicarious experiences—for
example, the experience of engaging with members of
outgroups. One study (Moyer-Gusé etal., 2019) exposed
mostly White and Asian samples of American partici-
pants from a midwestern university to a television show
about a Christian man who lives with a Muslim family
for 30 days and follows their customs. In the show, the
man is apprehensive about living with the family and
expresses concern about their views. Over the course
of the 30 days, he comes to learn more about their
community and benefits from interacting with them.
The researchers compared this condition with a control
condition that involved a show from the same series
about a wealthy family who tried to live on minimum
wage for 30 days. The treatment led participants to hold
more favorable attitudes toward Muslims both immedi-
ately after the intervention and a week later. Mediation
analysis indicated that participants who identified with
the Christian character were more likely to feel capable
of having conversations with Muslim Americans. This,
in turn, predicted lower rates of social anticipatory
anxiety and prejudice. An alternative route is to use
narratives to target the prototypes that people hold of
outgroups. A similar study exposed participants to
counter-stereotypical Muslim exemplars. The study
reduced intergroup anxiety as well as explicit and
implicit prejudice (D. R. Johnson etal., 2013).
Persistence and rigidity. One question is whether the
persuasive effects of stories quickly fade out. Evidence
suggests that, at least in the short to medium term, the
opposite happens: Effects may increase over a week or
two. In one study, participants were randomly assigned
to read a fictional narrative excerpt about a kidnapping
or a nonfiction control story (Appel & Richter, 2007). Par-
ticipants were asked to rate both the extent and the cer-
tainty of their agreement or disagreement with fact-related
assertions they had encountered in the narrative. Half of
the participants completed their responses immediately
after reading the narrative, whereas the other half
answered these questionnaires 2 weeks later. For the
experimental group, encountering false assertions low-
ered the endorsement of previously held (true) beliefs,
whereas encountering true assertions neither raised nor
lowered belief endorsement. Changed beliefs were held
with a higher certainty after a 2-week period.
Relatedly, once people have been exposed to stories
about a group, the beliefs and attitudes shaped by those
stories can be difficult to change. Portrayals become
sticky. People pay more attention to and later remember
stereotypical information about real or artificially cre-
ated groups (Bratanova & Kashima, 2014; Judd etal.,
2005). This bias for stereotypical information affects the
transmission of stereotypical traits in chains of con-
nected participants exposed to stories. For example,
even in contexts in which participants remember
stereotype-inconsistent information better than stereo-
type-consistent information in individual recall tasks,
chains of connected participants recalling stories pro-
duce a reliable bias for stereotype-consistent informa-
tion (Kashima, 2000). This bias could be due to people’s
preference to discuss shared information, relative to
unshared information (Stasser & Titus, 1985). And
because stereotypical information could be assumed to
be shared, this creates the circumstances for stereotypes
to take hold following the dissemination of stories
through social networks.
Behaviors. There are two ways in which stories are
thought to influence behaviors. The first pathway is through
changes to beliefs and attitudes, just discussed. People may
formulate intentions to undertake a behavior in response to
updating their beliefs about a target behavior, their percep-
tions about the social norms surrounding the activity, or
their confidence in their ability to competently complete an
action (Fishbein & Ajzen, 2010). An alternative route is
automatic. People may mimic behaviors without ever con-
sciously realizing that they do so (Zhou etal., 2017).
122 Walsh et al.
Experimental evidence of the effect of stories in real-
world contexts has begun to emerge. In a randomized
controlled trial conducted in Nigeria (Banerjee etal.,
2019), roughly 5,000 young people were invited to watch
soap operas, and the researchers examined their effect
on sexual health behavior. In one condition, participants
watched the television show Shuga. The show depicted
young Africans from different social classes balancing
their bright aspirations with the harmful consequences
of high-risk behavior. In another condition, participants
watched a show called Gidi Up. The show had a similar
setting but no content on health. The researchers pre-
sented the movies in 80 sites across southwest Nigeria.
Eight months later, participants in the treatment group
were twice as likely to get tested for HIV than the control
group. Participants were also more knowledgeable about
HIV: They were more likely to know about its transmis-
sion and about antiretroviral drugs. The show did not
increase self-reported condom use. However, the likeli-
hood of testing positive for chlamydia fell by 55% among
women in the sample. This may be because people
decided to have fewer partners.
One consideration with studies such as this is that
the stories may simply be efficient conduits for informa-
tion. Could the outcomes of the soap opera have been
achieved with a simple public service announcement?
Research is still in the early stages. One study measured
behavioral outcomes and compared the effect of nar-
rative and informational videos on low-income African
American women’s use of mammography, as well as
their cancer-related beliefs, recall of core content, and
range of reactions to the videos (Kreuter etal., 2010).
Women from St. Louis, Missouri (aged 40 and older),
were randomly assigned either to watch a narrative
video containing stories from African American breast
cancer survivors or to listen to equivalent informational
content delivered in a lecture format. The researchers
tested effects immediately after the video and also after
3 and 6 months. The narrative video raised women’s
perception of the importance of cancer screening and
led them to see mammography as a more effective way
of protecting against the disease. The narrative video
was most impactful for women with less than a high
school education: 6 months later, this group was twice
as likely to have gotten a mammography exam.
Collective action
Finally, in addition to their uses for learning and per-
suasion, stories are key to managing collective action
problems—namely, challenges characterized by inter-
dependence. Political theorists emphasize that collec-
tive action is hard because individual decision-makers
must make group-level choices about public matters
(R. Hardin, 1982), in which people often have compet-
ing interests and often do not know what others believe
or want. Social scientists and psychologists have long
emphasized the role that stories play in collective
action—driving the formation and dynamics of nations
(Tilly, 2002), religions (Dunbar, 2022), hunter-gatherer
communities (D. Smith etal., 2017; Sugiyama, 2001),
organizations (Boje, 2008), cultural groups (Michalopoulos
& Xue, 2021), and even financial markets (Shiller,
2017).
To show how stories are used in collective action, it
is necessary to describe the mechanics of two important
collective action problems: coordination challenges and
social dilemmas. Coordination challenges are situations
in which the relative payoffs from one person’s actions
are affected by others’ actions. Some kinds of coordina-
tion, such as deciding which side of the road to drive
on, are simple. It matters little whether you drive on
the right or the left side of the road as long as every-
body else obeys the same rules. But many coordination
challenges are more complicated. For example, col-
laborating may come with large payoffs, but only if
everybody chips in. This scenario is described by the
stag hunt (Lewis, 1969; Skyrms, 2001, 2004), a classic
economic game in which it is in people’s interest to
collaborate, but only if everybody else does so, too (see
Fig. 6a).
Social dilemmas are situations in which it is in peo-
ple’s shared interest to cooperate but in individuals’
private interest to “defect” (Dawes, 1980). This describes
many of the world’s most urgent social problems—
climate change, taxation, waste management, and
public-resource use (Ostrom, 1990). Because theory
predicts that these scenarios lead to collective failure,
they are described as the “tragedy of the commons”
(G. Hardin, 1968). The simplest case is captured in the
two-person prisoners’ dilemma—the story of two pris-
oners who have been placed in separate interrogation
rooms on suspicion of armed robbery. The police lack
evidence to convict them of the armed robbery but
found them in possession of illegal firearms, for which
they can each get a 1-year sentence. The detectives
separately offer each prisoner a deal:
We have you on illegal possession of firearms—
that’s a 1-year sentence. We can do you a deal,
though, if you testify against your coconspirator.
They will get 5 years, but we’ll let you off. Now,
that assumes they don’t testify against you! If they
give evidence against you and you give us noth-
ing, you’ll get 5 years. Either way, you’re better
off testifying. If they testify against you, your tes-
timony can still reduce your sentence. You’ll each
get 4 years.
Psychological Science in the Public Interest 23(3) 123
ab
Stag Hunt Prisoner’s Dilemma
Hunter 1
Stag Hare
Hunter 2
Stag $150, $150 $25, $0
Hare $0, $25 $25, $25
Prisoner 1
Stay Silent Betray
Prisoner 2
Stay Silent −1, −
10
, −5
Betray −5, 0 −4, −4
Fig. 6. Coordination challenges and social dilemmas. The stag hunt and the prisoners’ dilemma are classic economic games. It is note-
worthy that they are presented as vignettes or stories. The payoff structure for each hunter in the stag hunt is shown in (a), where the
values in each cell correspond to Hunter 1’s payoff followed by Hunter 2’s payoff. The optimal strategy for each player depends on the
actions of the other player. If Hunter 1 hunts stag, Hunter 2 will maximize their payoffs by also hunting stag. And if Hunter 1 hunts hare,
Hunter 2 will maximize their payoffs by also hunting hare. Because the payoff for hunting hare is unconditional (i.e., it is not based on
the decision of the other hunter), this is the risk-dominant strategy. Because the payoff for hunting stag is greater (i.e., it is larger than
for hunting hare), this is the payoff-dominant strategy. The payoff structure for each prisoner in the prisoner’s dilemma is shown in
(b), where the values in each cell correspond to Prisoner 1’s payoff followed by Prisoner 2’s payoff. As a group, the best course for the
prisoners is staying silent, which will result in each getting only 1 year in confinement. But as individuals, both prisoners are better off
betraying the other no matter what the other prisoner does. If Prisoner 1 stays silent, Prisoner 2 can get off entirely by betraying them.
If Prisoner 1 betrays Prisoner 2, Prisoner 2 will still reduce their own sentence by reciprocating the betrayal. When the prisoners act in
their private interest, they end up with the largest combined jail sentence.
Collective action problems have well-understood
solutions. The government can mandate cooperative
behavior through threat of violence (Fukuyama, 2011),
a foundational argument made by Thomas Hobbes
(1651/1991). Alternatively, communities can leverage
repeated interaction. When people know that they are
going to be dealing with others again and again, they
generally forecast that it is in their best long-term inter-
est to cooperate (Axelrod & Hamilton, 1981). Communi-
ties can also engage in voluntary punishment. When
groups can impose costs on defectors, they are able to
sustain higher levels of cooperation (Fehr & Gächter,
2002). We add stories to this list. Stories affect collective
action by establishing common knowledge, expecta-
tions, explanations, reputations, and shared identities
(see Fig. 7).
Common knowledge. Groups generally require com-
mon knowledge to solve collective action problems
(Lewis, 1969), and stories are an effective way of establish-
ing it. Common knowledge means that members of a group
all hold a particular set of beliefs and also know that the
other members also hold those beliefs. It can be contrasted
with mere mutual knowledge, where each person holds
the knowledge, but no one is aware that others also hold
it. To illustrate why common knowledge is important,
imagine you are driving in rural Thailand, where people
drive on the left-hand side of the road. You are close to
the border with Cambodia, where people drive on the
right-hand side of the road. The road you are driving on is
barely wide enough for two cars, and the marking down
the middle has faded. As you navigate the winding road,
an oncoming car (the first you have seen in this border-
land region) comes speeding toward you. You are certain
that you are supposed to drive on the left-hand side of the
road. The driver coming toward you also knows this, but
you do not know that they know. They could be a tourist
or a local who follows a different custom. After all, they
are coming from a region that drives on the right. The road
is narrow, and each car will need to shift left or right to get
by. What should you do? Although both you and the other
driver hold the correct knowledge, it is not enough. Your
knowledge, though correct, is siloed. To avoid a crash, you
will both need to signal your intention to each other to
drive on the left (or right—again it does not matter as long
as you make the same choice!).
Stories establish common knowledge in two ways.
First, they spread information virally through networks—
for example, by word of mouth, text, or social media.
The following experiment offers a nice demonstration
(Mesoudi etal., 2006): People shared information in
four-person chains, a process like the game of tele-
phone. Participants in the first round read information
and passed it on to a second person. That second per-
son passed it on to a third person, and the third person
passed it on to a fourth. The research team afterward
recorded the amount of information each person
recalled and whether the recollection was accurate. To
124 Walsh et al.
test what kind of information spread with the best
strength and fidelity, they randomly varied the informa-
tion they gave participants in the first round. One group
received factual nonnarrative information about the city
of Denver, Colorado. Another group received basic nar-
rative structure but nothing remarkable—simply a
description of ordinary events in a woman’s life. A third
group received a prototypical story—gossip about a
woman who had a sexual relationship with a married
professor and became pregnant. Each paragraph con-
tained the same number of propositions (defined as “a
predicate plus a series of ordered arguments”; Mesoudi
etal., 2006, p. 411) and was roughly the same length—
thus, the informational structure was largely equivalent.
But as the information ran through the chain, people
recalled more propositions and recalled them more
accurately in the gossip condition than in the other
conditions. The prototypical story lived longer.
The first-order implication of stories going viral is
that more people are likely to be exposed to informa-
tion. But the second-order implication is more interest-
ing. Virality also signals to the audience that other
people have been exposed to the information. People
want to know what others know. They are sensitive to
being left out of the loop (Jones etal., 2009). When
people know that others have seen and approved of
particular viewpoints, they are more likely to adopt
those viewpoints themselves (Vlasceanu & Coman,
2022). One reason for this is that when stories propa-
gate extensively among individuals, for example,
through conversations, the communities converge on
the conveyed beliefs and intentions (Vlasceanu etal.,
2018). In studies on this process, participants read sto-
ries and then individually recalled them, after which
they engaged in several rounds of joint recollections as
part of conversational social networks. Finally, partici-
pants once again recalled the initially studied stories.
A burgeoning literature shows that communities com-
posed of more interconnected subgroups converge
faster on the same information if they interact soon
after exposure to a public event, compared with com-
munities of less interconnected subgroups (Momennejad
etal., 2019). Furthermore, increasing people’s motiva-
tion to relate to one another during conversational
interactions further accelerates convergence processes,
as do people’s perceived similarity with one another
(Coman & Hirst, 2015).
Why does this happen? First, people’s memories and
beliefs are highly malleable (Chater, 2018; Schacter,
1999). This is what allows, under certain circumstances,
alignment to occur following social interactions (Coman
etal., 2009). The fact that previously encoded memories
get strengthened on retrieval, for instance, indicates
that the cognitive system maintains fluid mental repre-
sentations that are likely to change over time, depending
on circumstances. Second, social-influence processes
manifested in social interactions impact the degree to
which people’s cognitive representations become
aligned (Coman & Hirst, 2015). As an example, the
motivation to relate to one another in social interactions
meaningfully influences how much people alter their
memories and beliefs (Echterhoff etal., 2009). And
third, synchronization among individuals at a local level
leads to the emergence of collective memories and
beliefs at a community level (Coman etal., 2016).
But stories may propagate in unexpected ways.
Because stories are culturally dependent, their propaga-
tion relies on the ability of communities to synchronize.
Stories both reflect and generate culture. That is, cul-
tural dynamics circumscribe what people attend to,
remember, and are willing to communicate to one
another. These differences are showcased by a recent
investigation into the generation of narratives in
response to listening to instrumental music (Margulis
Expectations Explanations
Reputations Shared Identities
Common Knowledge
Fig. 7. How stories affect collective action. Expectations describe the beliefs that people
hold about the kind of interaction they are having, as well as their role and others’ roles
within that interaction. Explanations describe peoples’ understandings of the systems they
engage with (e.g., the economy, society, and the physical world). Reputations describe how
people use others’ track record of behavior to decide how to interact with one another.
Shared identities describe how people see themselves as members of groups—which, in
turn, determines their social preferences. Common knowledge—which essentially describes
when everybody knows they are all on the same page—is at the heart of all of these drivers
of collective action challenges.
Psychological Science in the Public Interest 23(3) 125
etal., 2022). Participants in three different geographical
locations (Arkansas; Michigan; and Dimen, China) lis-
tened to instrumental music and generated narratives
to represent several musical excerpts. Natural-language-
processing techniques assessed the similarity of these
narratives within and across cultures. A clear pattern
emerged: Participants from the same culture (Arkansas
and Michigan) produced more similar narratives than
participants from different cultures (Arkansas and
Dimen; Michigan and Dimen).
What are the mechanisms for such a pattern? Psy-
chological research points to two interrelated explana-
tions: initial perception and subsequent filtering through
cultural schemas. First, culture impacts the way infor-
mation is initially processed. For instance, exposure to
the same visual stimuli resulted in differences in infor-
mation processing across different cultures. Japanese
participants processed visual scenes more holistically,
focusing on the relations among the different elements,
compared with American participants, who employed
item-specific processing (Masuda & Nisbett, 2001).
Closer to a narrative instantiation of these differences,
American participants segmented visual scenes of rou-
tine activities in more fine-grained ways, compared with
Indian counterparts, providing evidence of Americans’
preference for analytic processing (Swallow & Wang,
2020). The source of these cultural differences so early
on during the information-processing chain is specula-
tive at best. One proposal is that they emerge because
of cultural heterogeneity in early socialization practices
and exposure to different environmental conditions that
involve routine engagement in tasks that strengthen
these preferences (Gelfand etal., 2011). Second, cul-
tural schemas impact the way stories are processed and
told (Karsdorp & Fonteyn, 2019). These schemas are
defined as widely shared knowledge structures that
provide default assumptions about an event’s charac-
teristics and relations to other events (DiMaggio, 1997;
Fiske & Linville, 1980). Through these culturally
grounded cognitive schemas, a person can impose
meaning on ambiguous information (Bartlett, 1932).
Stories also establish common knowledge from the
top down, through mass media. Super Bowl ads are an
illustrative example (Chwe, 2013). These ads often sell
prestige goods such as cars and technology products—
things that are valuable in part because they signal
social status to others (Veblen, 1899). The point of these
ads is not simply to reach a very large audience but
also to signal to audiences that others are watching.
The common knowledge produced by these ads can
increase the status of these goods, establishing imme-
diately that everybody knows about them and has seen
them in a particular attractive light. Although to the best
of our knowledge, nobody has systematically catego-
rized the share of media content that is narrative and
nonnarrative, stories make up a significant share of
media content—for example, television series, movies,
the news, reality television shows, and documentaries.21
One explanation for the effects of soap operas on
fertility in Brazil, discussed earlier, is that the shows’
popularity established common knowledge about pos-
sible alternatives for families. An extensive literature in
social science describes how individuals and families
navigate complex social-expectations-related gender
roles and family structures (Andrew & Adams-Prassl,
2023; Carvalho, 2013). Social practices are not simply
an agglomeration of private interests. Rather, people
act in anticipation of what others will think (Bicchieri,
2005; Bursztyn etal., 2020).
Expectations. Expectations are key to collective action
because outcomes are jointly determined. Social interac-
tions are generally complex, requiring that people, in real
time, anticipate how others will act and how their coun-
terparts will interpret and respond to their own actions.
The literatures in psychology and social science empha-
size the narrative quality of human action (Ostrom etal.,
2002; Sarbin, 1990; Schank & Abelson, 1977). People
learn how events play out through direct observation of
other people (Bandura, 1977), but these learnings are
incomplete. People also learn how to interact through
the stories they hear as children from their parents,
through the gossip heard about how others behave, and
through the stories in mass media (Baumeister et al.,
2004; Swidler, 1986; Zerubavel, 2009). Stories establish
expectations about two important characteristics required
for interaction. First, they define the interactive context
(e.g., the characters are at a restaurant), which enables
people to simulate how events will unfold (S. G. B. Johnson
etal., 2022). Second, they signal to people their role in
that context (e.g., the characters are dining), helping
them identify which script or performance to act out
(Bicchieri, 2005; Geertz, 1973).
Consider first the role of stories in establishing con-
text. In an illustrative study, psychologists invited par-
ticipants to play the prisoner’s dilemma (see Fig. 6b).
One group of participants were told they were playing
“the Wall Street game.” The other group were told they
were playing “the community game.” Although all par-
ticipants were presented with the same incentive struc-
ture, the labels evoked competing stories. Wall Street
evokes narratives of greed, where the actors are self-
interested. Community evokes narratives of coopera-
tion, where the actors help each other out. If such
stories were mere pageantry, participants would behave
in roughly the same way regardless of the label the
126 Walsh et al.
researchers put on the game. Yet roughly 70% of par-
ticipants who were told that they were playing the Wall
Street game chose to betray the other prisoner, whereas
the proportion was the inverse in the community game.
Among this group, roughly 70% of participants chose
to cooperate (Liberman etal., 2004).
Next, consider how stories signal people’s roles to
them. It is through the stories they watch and hear
growing up that people learn what it means to be a
good parent, worker, or citizen. The roles then affect
decisions. One indicator of this is that when prisoners
and finance professionals are primed with their identity,
they behave more dishonestly (Cohn etal., 2010, 2014).
Roles affect groups’ capacity for coordination by signal-
ing who will undertake what action (de Kwaadsteniet
& van Dijk, 2010). People know what is expected of a
father, a lawyer, and a waiter (Biddle, 2013) and often
accept the status and privileges associated with others’
role allocations because of their function in solving
coordination challenges for the group (Clark etal.,
2006; Keltner etal., 2008).
Roles exert a powerful influence on people’s capa-
bilities and resources (Keltner etal., 2008). Moreover,
because social roles are interdependently determined,
they are difficult or impossible for individuals to change
independently. It may be necessary for change to occur
at the group level. Stories can be a powerful way for
groups to negotiate new social roles. A study from India
is instructive. Hoff et al. (2020) examined the effect of
participatory theater on gender dynamics within the
household. In the performances, the theater group
enacted oppressive relations, then repeated the perfor-
mance to enable members of the audience to take the
role of protagonists and victims to address the oppres-
sion. This enabled groups to analyze the oppression
and to explore ways to resist and change roles. Across
3,000 households in 87 villages, compared with villages
that have never been exposed to the theater, women
were significantly more likely to participate in decision-
making roles and less likely to be part of abusive mar-
riages. Studies have found similar results from increased
exposure to cable television in rural India (Jensen &
Oster, 2009).
Explanations. Collective action often requires that peo-
ple converge on consistent explanations—accounts of
why things happened the way they did. To enact laws to
protect against the risk of another financial crisis, legisla-
tors must share at least a coarse explanation for why the
financial crisis happened. To assess whether a defendant
is guilty of murder, a jury must often agree why the defen-
dant was behaving the way they were. For this reason, the
policymaking process and the jury-based law system are
often characterized not only by debates over facts but also
by the narrative interpretations of those facts (Mukand &
Rodrik, 2018; Pennington & Hastie, 1992).
Stories are central to the explanations humans for-
mulate of social behavior (Bruner, 1991; Dennett, 1987,
1988; Sarbin, 1986, 1990). In a recent study on the nature
and origins of people’s narratives about the macroecon-
omy (Andre etal., 2022), a series of broadly representa-
tive surveys of 8,000 Americans and 100 experts were
created to investigate how people make sense of the
genesis of inflation. Policymakers express more complex
and abstract narratives such as loose monetary policy,
whereas households are more likely to invoke politi-
cized narratives about incompetent policymakers and
greedy corporations. People’s explanations affect their
expectations: Those who attribute inflation to the energy
crisis or government mismanagement think inflation will
last longer than those who attribute it to the opening
of the economy after the COVID-19 lockdowns.
Narratives are often deployed in competition with
one another to shape our interpretations of events. For
instance, in the jury-based law system, trials typically
entail debates over narrative interpretations of events.
In essence, defense attorneys and prosecutors attempt
to impose their story onto jurors. As an example, con-
sider the case of Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old African
American high school student murdered by George
Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch coordinator in a
gated community in Florida. During the murder trial,
Trayvon was described as either an innocent adolescent
or a dangerous young adult. Elements supporting these
narratives were carefully presented by the prosecutors
(e.g., Skittles found in Trayvon’s pocket) and defense
attorneys (e.g., prior high school suspension for pos-
sible marijuana possession), respectively. Pennington
and Hastie (1992) proposed the story model of judicial
decision-making to describe how this process of nar-
rative construction and adoption could impact people’s
decisions. According to this model, the jurors play an
active role in the story-generation process as they reach
a verdict by connecting different pieces of evidence
and creating a causal structure for these events. They
do so, this work indicates, by relying on three sources
of knowledge: the evidence presented during the trial,
their idiosyncratic knowledge of similar events, and
their expectations about what makes a story complete.
For judicial systems that involve juries, the processes
that involve narrative construction are social. That is,
the narrative-generation process, the connections
among pieces of evidence, and the knowledge that the
jurors bring to bear is constantly negotiated in social
interactions among the decision-makers.
Reputations. Another common strategy for managing
social dilemmas is to cooperate with others as long as
Psychological Science in the Public Interest 23(3) 127
they cooperate with you (Fehr etal., 2002; Fischbacher
etal., 2001; Trivers, 1971). A classic example is the tit-for-
tat strategy. This happens when actors repeat each other’s
actions. For example, in an economic game, if Player 1
acts prosocially toward Player 2, Player 2 will then behave
prosocially to Player 1. If Player 1 acts antisocially to
Player 2, Player 2 would then reciprocate with an antiso-
cial response to Player 1. Tit-for-tat strategies enable
groups to converge on cooperative equilibria (Axelrod,
1984). Groups that expend more effort and cost to moni-
tor and cooperate conditionally more effectively manage
their common pool of resources (Rustagi etal., 2010).
A limitation of this approach is that people often lack
firsthand knowledge of others’ prior behavior. One of
the main ways that groups hold people accountable for
their track record is by disseminating reputational infor-
mation about them (Greif, 1989, 1993). People, as it
turns out, are highly sensitive to the reputational con-
sequences of their actions (Barclay, 2010; Haley &
Fessler, 2005). Reputations mean that people’s track
record can be used even when their prior behavior is
not directly observable to their counterparts (Dunbar,
2004). Reputational information is most commonly
spread through gossip, namely positive or negative
evaluations of other people not present (Foster, 2004;
Haviland, 1977). Gossip’s defining feature is its evalu-
ative function; it does not exclusively take narrative
form. However, stories are an important means through
which people evaluate people’s characters, and people
take care to craft narratives to shape impressions (Kim
& Crockett, 2022).
Gossip may be even more effective than punishment
at promoting cooperation. A multiround public-goods
game gave people the option either to gossip about
their partners (the ability to send notes to future coun-
terparts’ future partners) or to punish them (take away
resources from them with a fine-to-fee ratio of 3:1).
Contexts in which people were able to gossip had more
robust effects on cooperation than contexts in which
people were able to punish. These effects persisted
beyond the game. The research team then asked par-
ticipants to play trust games after the public-goods
games, and they found that participants in the gossip
condition were more trusting and trustworthy. In line
with this, psychologists and economists have examined
the effect of reputation on collective action challenges
(Milinski, 2019). They find the mere possibility that
others may gossip and spoil their reputations leads
people to behave more generously in dictator games
and more prosocially in one-shot public-goods games
(Beersma & Van Kleef, 2011; Piazza & Bering, 2008).
People often rely on gossip even when direct observa-
tions of prior behavior is available (Sommerfeld etal.,
2007).
Shared identities. Identity also affects groups’ capacity
for collective action (Akerlof & Kranton, 2000, 2005).
Social identity determines the boundaries of community
membership (M. B. Brewer, 1991) and establishes peo-
ple’s role within their group (Biddle, 2013). Group mem-
bership makes collective action easier because shared
identity fosters prosociality and trust (M. B. Brewer, 1999;
Y. Chen & Li, 2009; Wit & Wilke, 1992).
Stories play a key role in personal identity formation
(McAdams & McLean, 2013). But stories are also impor-
tant for establishing shared identities (A. D. Brown,
2006; R. M. Smith, 2003). Consider the nation as an
example. Nations are perhaps the most important mod-
ern political unit. By providing the sociocultural under-
pinnings of the state, they determine where people can
travel and work, as well as what other economic ben-
efits they are entitled to enjoy (Fukuyama, 2014). Social
scientists have converged on the view that nations are
social constructions: “imagined communities” brought
together by myths of commonality (B. Anderson, 2006).
Psychologists, political scientists, and historians have
addressed the role that origin stories play in the forma-
tion of national identities (Roediger, 2021; R. M. Smith,
2003; Tilly, 2002; Wertsch, 2021). According to R. M.
Smith (2003), narratives of peoplehood
work essentially as persuasive historical stories that
prompt people to embrace the valorized identities,
play stirring roles, and have the fulfilling experi-
ences that political leaders strive to evoke for them,
whether through arguments, rhetoric, symbols, or
“stories” of a more obvious and familiar sort. (p. 45)
The power of narratives is reflected in their centrality
in politics. Origin stories often define the nature of the
nation—its aspirations, values, commitments, and ulti-
mately its integrity. Arguably, one of the central Ameri-
can schematic narrative templates is “the shining city
on the hill.” But often groups disagree or hold compet-
ing historical memories. In one study, Americans were
asked to list historical events “important to the founda-
tion of America,” whether those events were positive
or negative, and to list 10 historical events that “all
Americans should remember.” Republicans were signifi-
cantly more likely than Democrats to recall positive
origin stories and less likely to remember moral atroci-
ties such as slavery or the genocide of native Americans
(Yamashiro etal., 2022).
Nations often use narrative templates as cultural
schemas to make sense of contemporary public events.
Narrative templates are abstract, generalized schemas
that are widely shared within bounded communities.
In one analysis (Wertsch, 2008), the Russian narrative
template guides their interpretation of contemporary
128 Walsh et al.
world events. Russians show large consensus on the
expulsion-of-foreign-enemies narrative. According to
this narrative, the Russian nation minds its own busi-
ness; when powerful neighbors decide to encroach on
its interests and invade, the struggle that ensues leads
to an almost complete obliteration of the nation, but
because of both perseverance and a sense of destiny,
Russia emerges victorious. This template accommodates
numerous events from Russia’s history, including the
Great Patriotic War (Frederick & Coman, 2022), and is
likely to serve as a frame of reference for the contem-
porary understanding of the country’s 2022 invasion of
Ukraine. These templates, arguably, are culture specific
in that different cultures develop their own idiosyn-
cratic templates. Even though promising, this approach
is still in need of empirical grounding.
Stories can also determine who does and does not
get to belong. Origin stories grounded in ethnicity have
the capacity to exclude large swathes of minority popu-
lations, as may be the case in parts of continental
Europe (Fukuyama, 2018).22 Whether it is within nations
or smaller organizational units, one concern that people
often have is whether people such as them belong in
particular spaces and groups (Walton & Cohen, 2007).
When people do not feel that they belong, they often
struggle to thrive—failing to live up to their potential
in terms of well-being and performance. For example,
minorities and first-generation college students some-
times feel that they do not belong in universities. One
study (Walton & Cohen, 2011) shared stories with stu-
dents that framed social adversity in school as common
and temporary and encouraged them not to see difficul-
ties as unique to them or people such as them. The
stories depicted how older students had felt as though
they did not belong at first, but as time went by, they
felt more confident. The students were then asked to
write a story to echo these experiences and to deliver
it as a speech on camera. The intervention significantly
raised the self-reported health, well-being, and grade
point average of African American students who par-
ticipated in the study.
Although stories bond group members together, they
can also set them in conflict with other groups. As an
example, the death of a 12-year-old Palestinian boy,
Muhammad al-Durrah, was seen as one of the main
events that led to the Second Intifada, a Palestinian
uprising that lasted for 4 years and resulted in thou-
sands of casualties, primarily among the Palestinians.
The cause of al-Durrah’s death is widely disputed by
Palestinians and Israelis, with Palestinians accusing
Israeli soldiers of firing on the unarmed boy and his
father. The Israeli account implies that al-Durrah’s death
was caused by Palestinian fighters, who then blamed
it on Israeli soldiers. This story was propagated widely
both among Palestinians, providing support for a nar-
rative of the decades of injustice and atrocities commit-
ted by Israelis, and among the Israelis, who saw this as
evidence of the duplicity of Palestinians during the
conflict.
In a similar vein, psychological research has docu-
mented how the same story or event could be perceived,
discussed, and subsequently remembered in drastically
different ways by different subcommunities (Coman
etal., 2016). In a classic study (Hastorf & Cantril, 1954),
Princeton and Dartmouth students who saw a football
game remembered it in drastically different ways, con-
sistent with their group allegiance. Another mechanism
that could produce divergence involves the selection of
different events to craft group-relevant narratives. For
instance, Armenians might focus on stories that empha-
size the plight of the Armenian people during the first
World War, whereas their Turkish counterparts might
emphasize stories that depict the Armenian population
forging coalitions with the Ottoman Empire’s enemies.
Antagonistic relations between different communities
(Posner, 2004), the motivation to compete for scarce
resources (Riek etal., 2006), and the motivation to assert
group differences (Ybarra & Ramón, 2004) are factors
that are likely to lead to divergence in the construction
of these narratives.
In summary, societies use stories to achieve three
broad goals. First, they are used to facilitate learning.
Stories serve as an extension of social learning, enabling
people to engage in observational learning in contexts
that people rarely encounter in their day-to-day life.
Stories also assist teaching by capturing pupils’ attention
with engaging material. Second, stories are an effective
means of persuasion. They reduce reactance and make
people less likely to counterargue. They convey causal
models that convince people to see things from new
perspectives. They facilitate vicarious engagement with
groups that people might not ordinarily engage with.
Finally, stories facilitate collective action, enabling
groups to address social dilemmas and coordination by
establishing shared identities and common knowledge,
expectations, explanations, and reputations.
Conclusion: Stories and the Public
Interest
In this article, we laid out what stories are, how they
impact the mind, and how they can be leveraged in
policy. We described how stories have enabled societies
to transmit culture and regulate behavior over long
periods of time. We discussed the features of narrative
that make them so effective: engagement, identity, and
meaning. Finally, we discussed three functions of sto-
ries: learning, persuading, and collective action.
Psychological Science in the Public Interest 23(3) 129
Governments now regularly apply psychological
theory in policy design, often testing ideas with ran-
domized trials. Narratives have long been used in policy
communication, but this work has been an art rather
than a science. Here, we aimed to show that much is
now known scientifically about how stories work.
These principles may serve as a foundation for the
integration of narratives into policy design—addressing
challenges such as climate change, social cohesion, and
even the economy. As with other insights from psychol-
ogy, the scientific literature provides design principles
for interventions that ultimately must be tested empiri-
cally. As stories of different kinds are tested more rou-
tinely, it will be possible to develop a more systematic
understanding of the fit between particular story types
and different contexts.
For policymakers building a narrative, we offer the
following design principles:
Start with a problem: Research has consistently
shown that the most reliable way to engage people
in a narrative is to establish an inciting event and
create suspense as to whether it will be resolved.
Harness emotion: The literature suggests that emotion
is a key determinant of successful storytelling, par-
ticularly when there is flow between positively and
negatively valenced events. Hence, stories are more
effective when they take the audience on a journey
through the ups and downs of life’s hurdles.
Manage expectations: Stories require a trade-off
between fulfilling and violating the audience’s expec-
tations. Without any violations, the story is entirely
predictable and boring, but too many violations can
lead to confusion.
Make stories concrete: Transportation is elicited
through mental imagery. Audiences are more
engaged when stories contain vivid details that
enable people to feel that they can see, feel, and
touch the story world.
Leverage characters’ identities: Characters can serve
a variety of functions—whether it be to discourage
negative behaviors, encourage positive ones, or shift
how people think about others. Characters can also
be used to signal to audiences that the communicator
recognizes their perspective.
Mind the meaning: Leverage the causal logic of sto-
ries to convey to people what things they might
value and possible ways the world works. Story con-
tent receives most cognitive processing at causal
junctures.
Context matters: Stories come in all shapes and
sizes—from complex novels such as Ulysses to three-
line stories in newspapers. Fit the message to the
task at hand.
Treat the truth with care: A common theme in the
literature is that fictionality does not appear to limit
the effect of stories on attitudes, beliefs, and behav-
ior. This is especially important because people use
schemas to organize stories and regularly fill in the
gaps with stereotypes about people and other situ-
ations. To avoid spreading misinformation, govern-
ments should ground stories in available knowledge
and statistics.
Show, don’t tell: Stories, if saturated with morals and
educational content, cease to feel like entertainment,
potentially subverting the policy goals. Stories that
yield attitude change are effective precisely because
they are less likely to elicit reactance and do not feel
burdensome to consume.
Transparency
Editor: Nora S. Newcombe
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared that there were no conflicts of
interest with respect to the authorship or the publication
of this article.
Funding
Preparation of this article was funded by an Economic and
Social Research Council (ESRC) grant to the National Insti-
tute of Economics and Social Research (Reference Nos.
ES/R00787X/1 and RM02) and by the Oxford Martin School.
ORCID iD
James Walsh https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7682-5920
Notes
1. In this article, we treat the terms “story” and “narrative” as
synonyms.
2. Narratives do not necessarily have to be prototypical to have
social or psychological impacts. Even basic narratives such as
“he pulled himself up by his bootstraps to become CEO” or “the
pound collapsed when the chancellor announced the tax cuts”
can significantly affect how people organize their beliefs. For
this reason, we take an inclusive definition of narrative.
3. Classic psychology research suggests that audiences are
quick to interpret representations in agentic terms, even when
this defies logic. In a famous experiment, Heider and Simmel
(1944) showed people a short video depicting three shapes
(a large triangle, a small triangle, and a small circle) moving
around a screen, in and out of an opening and closing rect-
angular box. Most participants interpreted the movement of
the shapes as if it were the purposeful behavior of animals or
humans. The shapes (e.g., a big person chasing a smaller per-
son), the shapes’ inferred emotions (e.g., fear), and the shapes’
personal characteristics (e.g., bravery, aggression) all affected
130 Walsh et al.
participants’ interpretation of the agency of the observed visual
stimuli.
4. Dennett distinguished the intentional stance from two other
ways of looking at the world: the physical stance (the domain
of physics and chemistry) and the design stance (the domain
of engineering and biology). The physical and design stances
are concerned with making sense of the world by assessing the
nature or function of systems, respectively, whereas the inten-
tional stance organizes thought through reference to agents’
beliefs and desires (Dennett, 1987).
5. The musician is Dolly Parton. Parton has appeared in 12
films and made more than 400 television appearances (YouGov
America, 2022). Fame is measured by the proportion of people
who have heard of or who have a popular opinion of notable
people.
6. The motifs tended to fall into two broad categories: (a)
adventure and tricks and (b) cosmology and etiology. Many
of the motifs were virtually universal, but some were found in
a handful of groups. The most common motif—found in 355
of the 958 oral traditions—was the “tasks of the in-laws” and
described a narrative about how a “father or other kinsmen of
hero’s wife or bride try to kill or test him and/or suggest to him
difficult tasks” (Michalopoulos & Xue, 2021, p. 1998)
7. Approximately a third of the motifs depicted men as vio-
lent and aggressive and women as submissive and dependent.
Women were twice as likely to be depicted in domestic roles
and half as likely to be physically active.
8. The field has stirred debate within both the sciences and
the humanities (Bloom, 2012; Kramnick, 2011), though this is
beyond the scope of this article.
9. We know the name of the editor of the standard version of
the Epic of Gilgamesh (1999), Sîn-lēqi-unninni, because he is
listed on the text itself, and that the story is older because of
the availability of fragments from earlier periods in history. The
story was almost lost forever in 612 B.C.E. when the tablets
were buried beneath the burning ruins of an Assyrian king’s
palace, only to be rediscovered in 1853 by archaeologists near
Mosul, Iraq (Damrosch, 2007).
10. Powell (1996) has argued that the Greeks’ motivation for
developing their alphabet was to document these stories.
11. In these studies, the authors suggest that these correlations
are causal, arguing that variation in access to media is driven
by exogenous or arbitrary factors. For example, some areas
received access to television earlier than others in the United
States because of technical problems in the spectrum alloca-
tion, neighboring towns gained access to Fox News in different
years, and the signal strength of television coming from Berlin
varied across East Germany.
12. Transportation is broadly synonymous with engagement.
Busselle and Bilandzic (2009) also add two features in their
definition of engagement: narrative understanding (i.e., com-
prehension) and narrative presence (i.e., “being there”).
13. Attention refers to the focus of consciousness, either attend-
ing to external stimuli for the purpose of encoding information
or retrieving the information from memory (Chun etal., 2011).
14. Emotions are short-lived and intense mental states charac-
terizing evaluative, valenced reactions to stimuli (e.g., events/
agents); these reactions include cognitive appraisal, arousal,
subjective feeling states, and motivation (Fiske & Taylor, 2021;
Ortony etal., 2022).
15. A noteworthy distinction is between liking a story and
enjoying a story. It is possible to love the plot of a narrative but
not enjoy the experience of reading or watching it (e.g., if the
story is too descriptive or the text too small).
16. Identification is related to parasocial interaction, which
refers to companionship between the audience and characters.
Parasocial interaction operates as though it were a real-world
social relationship; the audience develops lasting attachments
that influence real-world aspirations (Giles, 2002). What distin-
guishes identification from parasocial interaction is that identifi-
cation requires that people observe some characteristic that they
and another person share. By contrast, people may still engage in
parasocial interaction without sharing similarities, thus facilitating
interaction with characters who are disliked. Hence, identification
creates deep attachments but narrows the possibility for perspec-
tive taking, relative to parasocial interaction. For a general dis-
cussion of the identification construct, see Cohen (2001); Cohen
et al. (2018, p. 507); de Graaf et al. (2012, pp. 805–806); and
Tal-Or and Cohen (2010, pp. 403–405). Identification and trans-
portation are related but distinct constructs (Tal-Or & Cohen,
2010). Transportation is not explicitly related to characters, and
identification with characters is personal, going beyond involve-
ment with the narrative itself. For example, in the persuasion lit-
erature (Tal-Or & Cohen, 2010), the valence of information about
the hero affects the level of identification because this helps
determine whether the character is likeable.
17. Learning refers to the encoding of novel information for
long-term use. It determines the human ability to do virtually
everything from walking to talking; people gain many basic
capacities through learning processes (Heyes, 2018). One signa-
ture of this is humans’ unusually long developmental periods.
Animals with large, complex brains have long developmental
periods and have more developed capacities for socialization
(Dunbar, 1993, 1998; Herculano-Houzel, 2019).
18. See Caro and Hauser (1992) for a more precise definition.
19. Scientists working at the intersection of psychology, biology,
and anthropology continue to dispute the precise mechanisms
underlying social learning (Heyes, 2012). Hoppitt and Laland
(2013) provide a comprehensive review.
20. We do not address the use of persuasion by companies
and other private interests (see van Laer et al., 2014, for a
discussion).
21. Nonnarrative communication is likely to be found in opin-
ion pieces, interviews, debates, public service announcements,
music, and product advertisements.
22. One force that may mitigate this, however, is that political
actors often have incentives to use stories to form broad coali-
tions that can attain power (R. M. Smith, 2003).
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