#24: Persuasion via Story-Telling with Melanie Green

Melanie Green studies stories. She’s a professor of Communication at University of Buffalo, and for years she’s been looking into whether stories can serve to persuade people. Are stories just entertainment or can they change our minds? In this episode, we talk about stories, her research on persuasion, and the experience of being transported by a story.Topics that come up in this episode:People differ in their “transportability,” which is associated with their receptiveness to narrative persuasion (Mazzocco et al., 2010)Narrative persuasion depends on transportation (Green & Brock, 2000)Meta-analyses of narrative persuasion studies (Braddock & Dillard, 2016; Oschatz & Marker, 2020; Zebregs et al., 2015)Research by Jeff Niederdeppe’s lab on story-telling in health communicationStories continue to be persuasive after proven false (Green & Donahue, 2011)People make judgments of a person’s warmth or competence depending on whether they tell stories (Clark, Green, & Simons, 2019)Check out my new audio course on Knowable: "The Science of Persuasion."For a transcript of this episode, visit: http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/episode/persuasion-via-story-telling-with-melanie-green/Learn more about Opinion Science at http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/ and follow @OpinionSciPod on Twitter.Join me over at Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/OpinionScienceLearn more about Opinion Science and catch up on all the episodes at http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/.