Narratives’ Impacts on Attitudes:Do Signaling of Persuasive Intent and Fictionality Matter?

Reduced counterarguing – the generation of questions and arguments in response to a message has been proposed be mechanism persuasion variety contexts, yet many remain unanswered regarding factors that influence this process. Building upon past theorizing narrative persuasion, present work investigates whether signaling persuasive intent (signaling vs. no signaling) fictional presentation texts (fact fiction) decrease and, turn, increase persuasion. Using 2 × factorial design across four topics at three time points, hypotheses were tested with narratives controversial political issues, presented either or without news short fiction format. The online experiment demonstrated impacted attitudes, even when captured later follow-up session. However, neither nor influenced extent attitude change, both immediately after exposure again survey two days later.