Prosocial Storytelling: Advancing the Field Through a Systematic Review
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.52152/RCR.V13.S11Keywords:
Prosocial Storytelling, Narrative Persuasion, Literature Review, Extended Reality, Emerging MediaAbstract
The possibilities afforded by emerging media and technologies have attracted growing interest in the use of narratives for prosocial change, establishing prosocial storytelling as a promising area of research. Yet, as current research is scattered across various domains and disciplines, the conceptual foundations and methodological approaches for assessing the persuasive impact of prosocial narratives remain limited. The current review takes a first step toward advancing the field of prosocial storytelling by synthesizing and analyzing existing work across both traditional and emerging media. Following the PRISMA framework, we systematically review experimental studies that have examined prosocial storytelling (n=34) and analyze the narrative stimuli used in these studies (n= 60), including their overarching themes and narrative features such as perspective and story ending valence. The findings demonstrate that studies tend to focus on text-based narratives, and relatively few have measured actual prosocial behavior. The results furthermore point towards a need for research elucidating the use of narrative perspective, and the role of narrative ending and closure in prosocial narrative effects. We provide directions for future research and specific recommendations for scholars and practitioners working with prosocial storytelling across traditional and emerging media.
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