Interactive Narratives: Evaluating the Impact of Agency and Immersion on Empathy and Attitude Change Toward Marginalized Groups

Abstract

Interactive narratives provide the reader with a sense of agency and immersion by giving readers the ability to effect change in the story through choice. In this dissertation, I conducted a series of three empirical studies that aimed to bridge the gap between existing work on interactive narratives in the realm of computer-human interaction and the body of work on empathy in the field of social psychology. I developed interactive narratives based on the lived experiences of two marginalized social groups often subject to physical or social exclusion from public spaces. Specifically, I looked at accessibility in public bathrooms through the lens of physically disabled people and transgender people.In Study 1, I demonstrated the effectiveness of interactive narratives in promoting participants’ sense of agency or control, which, in turn, led to a variety of prosocial outcomes. I also aimed to induce a sense of immersion through these narratives, which shows great promise for yielding positive prosocial outcomes. In Study 1, I found that immersion seems more difficult to induce for participants who hold high levels of prejudice against the target group—especially for people in the transgender protagonist condition. In Study 2, I leveraged work on intergroup contact to encourage participants to individuate the protagonist. To do so, I manipulated the time point at which I told participants that the protagonist of the story was transgender. My findings ran counter to hypotheses—withholding the protagonist’s trans identity until the end of the story (which, theoretically, should have led to greater individuation of the protagonist) decreased immersion and, therefore, led to less empathetic outcomes in highly prejudiced individuals. In Study 3, I had participants take a measure of political ideology and told them whether they were ideologically similar to the story's protagonist. I found that although the results of Study 1 and Study 2 replicated, highly prejudiced participants did not report being more immersed in the narrative when I told them the protagonist was similar to them. With this line of research, I used several theoretical levers to attempt to immerse participants in the experience of another individual. In doing so, I demonstrate that certain factors (i.e., immersion) appear useful for promoting empathy. However, an effective one-size-fits-all intervention remains elusive when promoting empathy toward specific groups.