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 readersthe ability to effect change in the story. We conducted three experiments (N = 4,139) to explorehow interactive narratives can effectively enhance empathy. We used narratives which focusedon accessibility in public bathrooms through the lens of physically disabled people andtransgender people. In Study 1, we found that interactive narratives could promote agency andimmersion, two factors that theory suggests may contribute to prosocial outcomes. Further, wefound that immersion (and in turn, empathy) was more difficult to induce for participants whohold high levels of prejudice against the target group—especially for the transgender protagonistcondition. In Study 2, we attempted to encourage participants to individuate the protagonist bymanipulating the time point at which we told participants that protagonist was transgender. Ourfindings ran counter to hypotheses—withholding the protagonist’s trans identity until the end ofthe story decreased immersion and led to less empathetic outcomes in highly prejudicedindividuals. In Study 3, we manipulated the participant’s similarity to the protagonist (vis-à-vispolitical ideology) to try to increase empathy toward the protagonist. Although we replicatedfindings from Studies 1 and 2, highly prejudiced participants still did not report greaterimmersion even when the protagonist was purportedly ideologically similar to them. We findthat certain factors such as immersion appear useful for promoting empathy. However, aneffective one-size-fits-all intervention remains elusive when promoting empathy toward specific,heavily politicized groups.