Participants (N = 214) were randomly assigned to view one of four advertisements from two brands featuring narrative- or argument-based messages and completed measures of purchase intentions, believability, counterarguing, and emotional reactions to the ad. argument-based) and the outcome of purchase intentions. The present study tested three sets of potential mediators (believability, counterarguing, emotional reaction) of the relationship between message modality (narrative- vs. Narratives may outperform argument-based messages in certain situations, notably because they are thought to exert unique influence via particular mediational pathways. The finding that a brief epilogue may reduce the impact of the pro-alcohol storyline suggests easily implemented preventive strategies to counter the adverse impact of substance use portrayals in entertainment programming. Viewing a single television episode with a pro-alcohol message may lead to more positive attitudes toward drinkers. By contrast, including an epilogue after an anti-alcohol episode was unrelated to attitudes toward drinkers or drinking intentions. Including an epilogue after a pro-alcohol episode was related to more negative viewers’ attitudes toward drinkers and lower drinking intentions compared to a pro-alcohol episode with no epilogue. Exposure to the pro-alcohol episode was related to more positive attitudes toward drinkers.
Attitudes toward drinkers and drinking intentions were measured subsequently, along with reactions to the episode and demographic data, among participants aged 14–17 using an online study. The pro- and anti-alcohol episodes were shown alone or with an epilogue where a main character discussed the deleterious effects of excessive drinking. Television episodes were professionally produced to depict heavy drinking leading to either positive or negative consequences. This experimental study assessed whether alcohol television storylines impact youth drinking attitudes and intentions and whether corrective epilogues can potentially moderate this impact. The results contribute to our understanding of the psychological processes that may drive realism evaluations of stories and possible contrasting mechanisms between attributions in story worlds and the social world. When evaluating the story scenario for the self, however, results of all three experiments show that people find information consistent with their own spontaneous attributions more realistic. The results indicate that the relationship between spontaneously generated causal attributions and information supplied by the story had little influence on realism judgments about story characters or about other people. Three experiments examined how these spontaneously generated inferences of causality interacted with causal explanations provided by the text of a story to influence perceived realism. The attribution literature suggests that, when judging events that happen to others, people spontaneously generate dispositional explanations for negative events and situational explanations for positive events and the reverse when judging events that happen to themselves. Just as people generate causal explanations for social events around them, story readers usually generate inferences about causality of events when reading a story.
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