The effects of narrative story telling in journalistic crime news articles on readers' behavioral intentions.

Abstract

The current study aims to provide insights into the influence of narrative news articles on reader’s behavioral intentions. It was investigated whether the readers of narrative news were more likely to copy the behavior of the main character. A two-by-two between subject experiment was used to measure the effects. The article could be either a narrative news article or a traditional news article. Both the narrative and the traditional news article had a version in which the witness of a shooting either hided or ran away. Only the traditional journalistic articles had positively influenced the participants. Respondents who had read the traditional news article proved to be more likely to copy the action they had read about in the article when they had to choose between the behavioral intentions to jump up or to duck down than the readers of the narrative article.