The Effects of Reading a Story

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Research in my lab where we've tried to do things like Let me take a step back. It doesn't really matter whether you tell somebody that a story's fact or fiction You know people seem to be transported into it. They're persuaded by both of them Um people think that it should matter, but when it comes to the effects on people it seems generally not too And what we did in one of our say is we tried to push this a little bit farther and say hey, you know It's this isn't fiction. This is somebody that made this up to lie to you"

In this episode we discuss the power of narratives to affect our beliefs and behaviors with Melanie C. Green, a psychologist who studies the persuasive power of fiction.

According to Nielsen, the TV ratings company, the average person in the United States watches about 34 hours of television a week. That’s 73 days a year. Over the course of a lifetime, the average American can expect to spend a full decade lost in the trance spell that only powerful narratives can cast over the human mind.

What is the power of all the stories we consume through television? What about movies and books and comics and video games and everything else? How does it affect our beliefs and behaviors?

We discuss all of that and more with Melanie C. Green who is a social psychologist who developed the transportation into a narrative worlds theory that helps explain total story immersion and how it translates into influence over our real-world behaviors. Green is an assistant professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. You can find her on Twitter using the handle @NarrProf or her website.

After the interview I eat some chocolate orange cherry cookies sent in by Elliot Jones and then discuss how photographs can either enhance or dampen your memory depending on how you use them.

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