[Fictional persuasion] Michael Bitton has an interesting blog post (effectivealtruist.blogspot/2013/11/transportation-persuasion-and.html) summarizing literature on how people can acquire false beliefs from fiction without realizing it. He explains: ---- This is not to say that fiction transforms humans into passive recipients of fictional content [...]. But narrative devices such as suspense eliminate the additional careful attention people apply when they usually encounter information that runs counter to their real-world beliefs. Melanie Green and Timothy Brock identified transportation into a story as the process by which people’s high levels of engagement override their caution. During transportation, readers are especially vulnerable to persuasion from in-story messages. Narrative transportation is an exception to the two standard dual-mode theories of persuasion. ---- Michael cites How Might Literature Do Harm? (questia/library/journal/1P3-1656405411/how-might-literature-do-harm), which discusses both the benefits of literature (such as teaching social norms and increasing empathy: ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3559433/) as well as the potential dark side: ---- In the Republic, Plato notes that poets and story-tellers are in error in matters of the greatest human importance. They have said that unjust men are often happy and just men wretched, that wrong-doing pays if you can avoid being found out, and that justice is good for someone else but is to your own disadvantage (Lee translation 148-49). [...] Those works of literature that most effectively immerse their readers have the greatest potential to do both good and harm. The question becomes what distribution of information is actually made available through texts. Platos characterization of the lessons offered by poets and story-tellers has great contemporary resonance. How can we be certain that, on balance, its a good thing that readers absorb lessons from literature? ----
Posted on: Fri, 29 Nov 2013 10:39:25 +0000