Narrative transportation
Also known as: Transportation theory
Lose yourself in a story and you absorb its message uncritically.
What it means
The phenomenon whereby people become so cognitively and emotionally absorbed in a narrative that they are mentally 'transported' into its world, which makes them more susceptible to the beliefs and attitudes the story implies. Transported readers or viewers reduce counter-arguing, form vivid mental imagery, and feel real emotion toward characters, so persuasion happens through immersion rather than through logical argument. The deeper the transportation, the larger the attitude change, and effects can persist and resist correction. It matters as the mechanism behind the persuasive power of entertainment, advertising stories, and 'edutainment.'
Examples
After being swept up in a film's plot, viewers adopt its implied attitudes without scrutinizing them.
A charity appeal that follows one named child through her day raises more than a page of statistics, because donors absorbed in her story never pause to weigh the numbers.
Readers gripped by a novel about a wrongful conviction leave with firmer views on the justice system than readers handed the same facts as an essay, and argue back at neither.
First described in Green & Brock (2000).