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

Interactive narratives provide the reader with a sense of agency and immersion by giving readers the ability to effect change in the story. We conducted three experiments (N = 4,139) to explore how interactive narratives can effectively enhance empathy. We used narratives which focused on accessibility in public bathrooms through the lens of physically disabled people and transgender people. In Study 1, we found that interactive narratives could promote agency and immersion, two factors that theory suggests may contribute to prosocial outcomes. We found that immersion (and thus, empathy) seems more difficult to induce for participants who hold high levels of prejudice against the target group—especially for the transgender protagonist condition. In Study 2, we leveraged work on intergroup contact to encourage participants to individuate the protagonist by manipulating the time point at which we told participants that protagonist was transgender. Our findings ran counter to hypotheses—withholding the protagonist’s trans identity until the end of the story decreased immersion and led to less empathetic outcomes in highly prejudiced individuals. In Study 3, we examined whether manipulating the participant’s similarity to the protagonist (vis-à-vis political ideology) could increase empathy toward the protagonist. Although we replicated findings from Studies 1 and 2, highly prejudiced participants still did not report greater immersion even when the protagonist was purportedly ideologically similar to them. We find that certain factors such as immersion appear useful for promoting empathy. However, an effective one-size-fits-all intervention remains elusive when promoting empathy toward specific, heavily politicized groups.