Abstract
In various scientific fields from psychology to social sciences, experimental research on psychological and social effects of narrative-formed (or narrative-based) cognition and communication have been done since 1970s. In this study, we conducted a psychological experiment on how reading “narrative-formed policy scenarios” and participants' “narrative-orientedness” as personal psychological tendencies affects their attitudes toward public policies and discussed its applicability for the process of consensus building for public policies. The results show that reading narrative-formed texts and readers” narrative-orientedness, interacting with each other, have some statistically significant effects on the readers' attitudes. The results and the procedure of this experiment also give us implications about how to create “narrative-formed policy scenarios” and apply them to the real policy communications.
