Immersion in a narrative reduces counterarguing, so beliefs shift more from stories than from equivalent argument.
Green and Brock found in 2000 that readers absorbed in a story showed greater belief change and produced fewer critical thoughts, whether the story was labelled fact or fiction. The mechanism is the absence of resistance rather than the presence of evidence, which is why narrative persuades people who would have refuted the same claim stated plainly.
In practice
- A policy argued through one family's story moves an audience that the statistics did not.
- A reader who would query every figure in a report accepts the premises of a novel without noticing.