Participants
For partial credit,
10-15.
Method
97 undergraduates participated in groups of
Procedure
Participants read "Murder at the Mail" and completed the dependent
variable packet.
Experimental narrative: "'Murder at the Mall." The experimental narrative
was the previously described story adapted from How We Die
(Nuland, 1994, pp. 118-139). This nine-page story, "Murder at the Mall,"
is about a college student, Joan, whose little sister Katie is brutally stabbed
to death by a psychiatric patient at the mall. This narrative was selected
because it was plausibly framed as either fiction or nonfiction. Events are
presented realistically; however, the author has a rich descriptive style that
would not be typical of a straight journalistic account. The narrative also
tends to be highly involving, thus providing scope for a sensitive test of the
transportation hypothesis.
Source manipulations. Participants were assigned to either the fiction
or nonfiction conditions. These manipulations were not subtle; the information
was provided in bold, double-spaced print on the top of the first
page of the narrative, and the narratives were formatted to reflect the
alleged source. The nonfiction narrative was in small print arranged in
columns, resembling a newspaper, and the fiction narrative resembled a
literary magazine.
Fiction condition participants were informed that "the events in Murder
at the Mall comprise a short story, the Fiction Feature, as published in
Akron Best Fiction, an Ohio Fiction magazine, in December 1993. Resemblance
to real persons and places is of course coincidental."
In the nonfiction condition, participants were led to believe that the
narrative was a journalistic account: "The events in Murder at the Mall
occurred recently and were reported in the Akron Beacon Journal, an Ohio
daily newspaper, in December 1993."