Abstract
Since 1970s, psychological and social effects of thinking and communicating in 'narrative form' have been empirically studied across the fields of psychology and social sciences, and implications from those studies are expected to be applied to the process of consensus building on public policies. In this study, we defined a procedure of composing information in narrative form, and then we conducted an experiment to compare the effects on participants' attitudes caused by reading strongly-narrative-formed scenarios and reading moderately-narrative-formed ones. The results showed that strongly-narrative-formed scenarios cause stronger attitude changes, and the changing process is affected by some psychological factors such as 'narrative-orientedness', 'narrative transportation' and construction of 'situation models'. In addition, through defining the procedure of narrative composition and testing its effects, we found some practical implications for developing techniques of narrative-formed communication.
