EASP Seedcorn Grant Report
13.01.2025, by Media Account
By Zachary Niese

The Effect of Narrative Voice on Subjective Construal
Background and Project Goals
Stories’ narrative features can limit or amplify their power to transmit information, evoke emotions, and change minds (Nabi & Green, 2015). An inherent dimension of these stories is the narrative perspective from which they are told: sometimes stories are told from a person’s first-person narrative perspective (e.g., using I/me pronouns), whereas other times, they are told about the person using a third-person narrative perspective (e.g., using he/him, she/her, etc. pronouns). The choice to write a narrative from the first-person or third-person perspective can create important shifts in how the reader understands the story, relates to its main character, and adopts the views expressed in the text (e.g., Chen & Bell, 2022; Kaufman & Libby, 2012).
To date, this work has focused on the impact of narrative perspective on people’s subjective assessments of their experience of reading a text, such as their immersion in the narrative and their identification with the main character (Chen et al., 2016; see also: Green & Brock, 2003; Moyer-Gusé et al., 2011; Mazzocco et al., 2010). The current work instead tested the possibility that narrative perspective might produce more fundamental shifts in how information is understood, providing evidence for one mechanism by which first-person (vs. third-person) narratives are better equipped to help people take the experience of the main character.
In particular, the current work tests the effect of narrative perspective on how abstractly (vs. concretely) people construe written information. Previous work suggests that people tend to construe information about others (vs. the self) more abstractly (Fiedler et al., 2012; Trope & Liberman, 2010). Similarly, work on self-talk has found that when people refer to themselves in third-person voice, it creates a distancing effect that causes them to think about themselves like another person (Kross et al., 2014). As such, the current work tested the other side of this effect: does information about other people written from a first-person (vs. third-person) narrative voice causes readers to construe that information more concretely?
Research Activities and Findings
The grant provided funding for five experiments run using Prolific testing the impact of narrative perspective on construal level and the downstream consequences. Experiment 1a provided evidence for the basic effect: people showed a stronger preference for abstract (vs. concrete) descriptions of others’ actions when those actions were written about the other person from a third-person perspective (i.e., using he/him or she/her pronouns) compared to when the actions were written from the other person’s first-person perspective (i.e., using I/me pronouns). Experiment 1b replicated this effect using a within-subjects manipulation. Experiment 2a showed that this effect extends to people’s broader interpretations of narratives: people preferred abstract descriptions of a story’s bigger meaning (vs. a concrete descriptions of the story) to a greater extent for stories written from the third-person (vs. first-person) narrative perspective—and people’s own self-generated descriptions of the stories that they provided in Experiment 2b followed a similar pattern. Finally, Experiment 3 tested the consequences of these effects on a narrative’s persuasive impact. As hypothesized, this experiment did not find that one perspective or the other was more persuasive per se, but rather that the fit between narrative perspective and message construal was critical (see Czeizler & Garbarino, 2017): first-person (vs. third-person) testimonials were more persuasive when paired with low-level arguments, whereas third-person (vs. first-person) testimonials were more persuasive when paired with high-level arguments. Thus, the current experiments provided support for the hypothesis this grant was proposed to test: information written from a first-person (vs. third-person) narrative perspective causes people to construe that information more concretely (vs. abstractly).
Contribution to Wider Research Activities
The choice to write a narrative from the first-person or third-person perspective can create important shifts in how the reader understands the story and relates to its main character (Chen & Bell, 2022; Kaufman & Libby, 2012). The current work adds to the literature by providing evidence for a mechanism by which narrative perspective does so. Namely, the third-person (vs. first-person) narrative perspective causes people to fundamentally construe the text more abstractly (vs. concretely). Given the use of narratives as a persuasive device in donation campaigns, social justice movements, elections, product endorsements, etc., these findings not only provide insight into how narrative perspective influences people’s understanding of a written text, but also how that text subsequently influences people’s attitudes and behaviors. The grant recipient plans to further explore the consequences of the current effects in these various domains, using the current work as a basis for this future research.
References
Chen, M., & Bell, R. A. (2022). A meta-analysis of the impact of point of view on narrative processing and persuasion in health messaging. Psychology & Health, 37(5), 545–562. https://doi.org/10.1080/08870446.2021.1894331
Czeizler, A., & Garbarino, E. (2017). Give blood today or save lives tomorrow: Matching decision and message construal level to maximize blood donation intentions. Health Marketing Quarterly, 34(3), 175-186.
Fiedler, K., Jung, J., Wänke, M., & Alexopoulos, T. (2012). On the relations between distinct aspects of psychological distance: An ecological basis of construal-level theory. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 48(5), 1014-1021.
Green, M. C., & Brock, T. C. (2000). The role of transportation in the persuasiveness of public narratives. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79, 701–721. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.79.5.701
Kaufman, G. F., & Libby, L. K. (2012). Changing beliefs and behavior through experience-taking. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 103(1), 1.
Kross, E., Bruehlman-Senecal, E., Park, J., Burson, A., Dougherty, A., Shablack, H., ... & Ayduk, O. (2014). Self-talk as a regulatory mechanism: How you do it matters. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 106(2), 304.
Moyer-Gusé, E. (2008). Toward a theory of entertainment persuasion: Explaining the persuasive effects of entertainment-education messages. Communication Theory, 18, 407–425. doi:10.1111/j.1468-2885.2008.00328.x
Mazzocco, P. M., Green, M. C., Sasota, J. A., & Jones, N. W. (2010). This story is not for everyone: Transportability and narrative persuasion. Social Psychology and Personality Science, 1, 361–368. doi:10.1177/1948550610376600
Nabi, R. L., & Green, M. C. (2015). The role of a narrative's emotional flow in promoting persuasive outcomes. Media Psychology, 18(2), 137-162.
Trope, Y., & Liberman, N. (2010). Construal-level theory of psychological distance. Psychological Review, 117(2), 440.