Peifeng Sun’s research while affiliated with The University of Hong Kong and other places

Identification, the experience of a psychological merging between the self and a character, is a key mechanism underlying the power of narratives to influence attitudes, beliefs, intentions, and behaviors in story-consistent ways. Similarity between audience members and characters has been intuitively thought to be an antecedent of identification, but experimental studies have yielded inconsistent findings regarding the effectiveness of manipulating similarity on eliciting identification. The current meta-analysis synthesized and quantified the evidence from 39 studies (k = 50, N = 11,077) and investigated several potential causes of heterogeneity at both the narrative and study levels. The data revealed a small but significant and robust overall effect of similarity on identification (g = 0.19, 95% CI [0.10, 0.28], p < .001), with little evidence of publication bias. A notable narrative-level moderator was type of similarity, with manipulations of psychological similarity yielding larger effects than manipulations of objective similarity. In addition, study design emerged as a significant study-level moderator, with the similarity–identification effect being stronger in studies that manipulated similarity using a within-subjects design than those that used a between-subjects design. Insights gained from this meta-analysis can help to address some ill-defined aspects of the similarity–identification hypothesis, contributing to a better understanding of involvement with narrative characters. Practically, the results can inform the design of more effective targeted and tailored narrative messages that are intended to engage and persuade audiences using the tactic of incorporating similar characters.

In gambling contexts, near-misses tend to be perceived as more aversive yet elicit greater motivation to continue playing than clear losses. The current research aimed to examine these effects in the context of situational and dispositional social power. In a pre-registered online study, Hong Kong Chinese undergraduate students (N = 238) with varying levels of gambling involvement completed a measure assessing their general beliefs about their ability to influence others and were then randomly assigned to imagine themselves in a position of high or low power. Participants subsequently played a computerized scratchcard task that delivered wins, near-misses, and clear losses and took trial-by-trial ratings of valence, arousal, and motivation. Following a mandatory phase, persistence was measured via the number of additional scratchcards participants chose to purchase. The results generally corroborated previous findings of different subjective appraisals to near-misses vs. clear losses, but surprisingly found that near-misses were considered to be more pleasant than clear losses. Situational power did not differentially modify these responses. Nevertheless, a main effect of dispositional power emerged in that participants who felt chronically high in power were twice as likely to purchase additional scratchcards compared to their low dispositional power counterparts. This study suggests that a generalized sense of power but not situational power triggers approach motivation in the form of prolonged gambling play.