Persuasive Messages - How Do They Work?

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We see narratives everywhere We listen to narratives we tell narratives and so it's a little bit surprising that there had been a bit of a neglect of people looking at how exactly that works. In the book you say rhetoric rather than poetics has been the focus of scientific study when it comes to persuasion What do you think it is that we've Saved storytelling for so long? You know what's weird about stories I think is that since they are so ubiquitous they're everywhere you know books magazines movies television shows, whenever we create a new technology Storytelling flows into that technology and starts using that.

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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