Narrative transportation is the experience of being carried away by a story: attention, imagery and feeling all absorbed in the world of the narrative, so that for a while the reader or viewer is less present in their own. The idea was formalised by Melanie Green and Timothy Brock in 2000, who built a scale to measure it and showed that the more transported people were, the more their beliefs moved towards those implied by the story.
How it persuades
Transportation changes minds by a different route from argument. A transported audience is busy inside the story rather than evaluating it, so it raises fewer counterarguments and is less likely to notice the “false notes” a sceptical reader would catch. Emotional involvement with characters does the rest. In Green and Brock’s experiments the effect held whether a story was labelled as fact or as fiction, which is why transportation matters for drama as much as for journalism.
What drives it
A 2014 meta-analysis by Tom van Laer and colleagues, the extended transportation-imagery model, pulled the evidence together: transportation depends on the story (identifiable characters, an imaginable plot, verisimilitude) and on the receiver (familiarity, attention, a disposition to be absorbed), and it goes on to shift beliefs, attitudes and intentions. It is closely tied to character identification and to parasocial relationships with recurring characters, and at least one recent study found identification a stronger predictor of attitude change than transportation itself.
Why it matters for deep disposition work
Transportation is the best-evidenced mechanism by which screen and written stories move audiences, and it cuts both ways. A message bolted onto a story breaks the spell and invites resistance; a claim staged by the story’s world, and simply taken for granted there, rides along with the absorption. In a 2020 study of the climate series Years of Living Dangerously, Ashley Bieniek-Tobasco and colleagues found transportation raised viewers’ efficacy beliefs and narrowed the gap in risk perception between political affiliations (Science Communication, 2020). The honest limit: most of the evidence measures attitudes shortly after exposure, not the durable shifts in assumption that deep disposition work is after.
Key sources: Melanie C. Green and Timothy C. Brock, ‘The role of transportation in the persuasiveness of public narratives’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 79(5) (2000); Tom van Laer, Ko de Ruyter, Luca M. Visconti and Martin Wetzels, ‘The Extended Transportation-Imagery Model’, Journal of Consumer Research 40(5) (2014).
Also see Cultivation Theory, Schemas, Social Impact Entertainment and Homo Narrans