The Power of Black Panther to Affect Group Perceptions: Examining the Relationships Between Narrative Engagement, Narrative Influence, and Perceived Vitality of African Americans

Marvel’s Black Panther (2018) offered much discussion about the role of an entertainment narrative to influence moviegoing audience’s perceptions about African, African American, and Black experiences. Generally, entertainment narratives allow people to imagine themselves as different people, part of different worlds, and sometimes even living in different timeframes. By providing different perspectives, they can provide opportunities for understanding of and improved perceptions of others. The strength of these perspectives resides with the strength of the story’s ability to engage. The present study examines how engagement with the film’s narrative may be associated with perceived vitality of African Americans, and how this relationship may be mediated by the influence audiences perceive the narrative to have on others. The study provides two key findings. Generally, narrative engagement is associated with perceived vitality, through the perceived influence of the narrative on white audiences but not Black audiences. These associations seem to be driven by Black respondents, however, for White respondents, the associations are present when considering the narrative’s influence on Black audiences.

Stories Enlarge the Experience of Self

Temporarily expanded boundaries of the self (TEBOTS) proposes underlying motivations for engaging with stories. TEBOTS points out that fundamental human drives for agency, autonomy, and connectedness are imperfectly attainable. As a result, human beings turn to transcendent experiences that offer self-expansion, especially engagement with mediated worlds and the stories and characters they provide. TEBOTS provides unique hypotheses about how the self-concept relates to the selection, processing, and effects of media entertainment. Confirmatory evidence for TEBOTS shows that threats to the self can increase responsiveness to narratives, and that effects are attributable to a boundary expansion mechanism. Recent studies demonstrate that boundary expansion during media use can facilitate positive outgroup perceptions and attitude change. The TEBOTS framework also provides testable propositions regarding the influence of life stressors such as finance, health, and relationships on narrative engagement and enjoyment, carrying potential implications for narrative influence on stressed populations.

A safe space for self-expansion: Attachment and motivation to engage and interact with the story world

Insecure attachment places enduring limitations on one’s ability to satisfy important intrinsic needs. An increasing body of literature suggests that such barriers may motivate engagement with stories such as absorption into fictional worlds, sharing experiences and forming relationships with characters, and even pursuing vicarious satisfaction of unmet needs. Moreover, this sort of engagement has been demonstrated to drive narrative influence, further suggesting that barriers to intimacy in relationships such as those characterized by insecure attachment may render one more susceptible to the influence of entertainment media. A cross-sectional survey ( N = 1,039) revealed an interaction between the anxiety and avoidance dimensions of attachment wherein avoidance was negatively associated with parasocial relationships, boundary expansion, and transportability, as well as self-reported proclivities to reflect on and be impacted by story-based movies and television when anxiety was low but was associated with increased engagement when anxiety was high. The potential interplay between attachment and narrative influence is discussed with respect to targeting and tailoring media literacy and narrative-based interventions.

Distracted by details: Narrative influence following conflicting stories

Work on narrative influence has demonstrated that stories can have a strong effect on people’s thoughts and attitudes. However, existing research has not addressed how people respond to multiple stories endorsing different conclusions. The current studies examined how reading two conflicting narratives influences people’s decisions about a subsequent situation, with particular emphasis on how resemblances between the narratives and the situation moderate the effects. Across two studies, participants read two testimonials which described the successful use of different treatments for a medical disorder, and then made treatment recommendations for a patient who resembled one of the testimonials in treatment-relevant ways. The key manipulation was whether the patient also resembled the other testimonial in treatment-irrelevant ways. Both studies found that these distracting, irrelevant similarities led to less appropriate treatment recommendations. The effect on decision confidence, however, was less clear, with some suggestion of both an increase (Study 1) and a decrease (Study 2) in confidence.

A Conceptual Framework of Narrative Persuasion

This article draws insights from several disciplines to propose an integrated perspective on mechanisms underlying narrative persuasion. One approach to narratives emphasizes a deictic shift into the narrative, resulting in an absorbed state of processing and a loss of one’s sense of self (e.g., transportation, narrative engagement, identification). Another approach focuses on processes to construct meaning from a narrative; that is, how narratives are actively compared with and applied to one’s life. The current work has conceptualized the relationship between these two broad processes as occurring in sequence, and as a pathway of narrative persuasion: A shift and absorption into the narrative leads to a process of reflecting on the narrative, which is antecedent to narrative influence.