Using narratives and storytelling to communicate science with nonexpert audiences
Open accessAbstract
Although storytelling often has negative connotations within science, narrative formats of communication should not be disregarded when communicating science to nonexpert audiences. Narratives offer increased comprehension, interest, and engagement. Nonexperts get most of their science information from mass media content, which is itself already biased toward narrative formats. Narratives are also intrinsically persuasive, which offers science communicators tactics for persuading otherwise resistant audiences, although such use also raises ethical considerations. Future intersections of narrative research with ongoing discussions in science communication are introduced.
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Dahlstrom (2014) emphasizes three key features of stories: stories depict temporal events, are concerned with goal-directed agents, and represent causally related sequences.
“Dahlstrom (2014) emphasizes three key features of stories: (a) Stories depict temporal events, (b) stories are concerned with goal-directed agents, and (c) stories represent causally related sequences.”
From Stories in Action. (2022) · cites this paper as Dahlstrom, 2014
The Narratives passage (section labeled Abstract; page not provided) identifies causality, temporality, and characters as three standard features, supporting the first and third points. It does not specify goal-directed agents as the second defining feature, although another passage discusses characters’ motivations and actions. (LLM, conf=0.84)
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- Authors
- Dahlstrom, M. F.
- Affiliations
- Iowa State University (US)
- Corresponding author
- Dahlstrom, Michael F.
- Venue
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- Publisher
- National Academy of Sciences
- Published
- 2014-09-15
- Volume
- 111
- Issue
- supplement_4
- Pages
- 13614-13620
- ISSN
- 0027-8424 (ISSN-L)
- 1091-6490
- PMC
- PMC4183170
- OpenAlex
- W2034648286
- Cited by
- 1,159
- References
- 92
- Citations by year
- 2026: 114 · 2025: 124 · 2024: 128 · 2023: 119 · 2022: 142 · 2021: 134 · 2020: 124 · 2019: 105 · 2018: 93 · 2017: 27 · 2016: 40 · 2015: 8 · 2014: 1
- FWCI
- 457.47
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Locations
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (publishedVersion)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (publishedVersion)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Literature and Literary Theory › Media Influence and Health
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Climate Change Communication and Perception
- Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › Information Systems and Management › Academic Publishing and Open Access
- Keywords
- science communication, storytelling, narrative, mass media, persuasion, public engagement with science, scientific literacy, ethics of persuasion
- MeSH terms
- Humans, Mass Media, Persuasive Communication, Science, Information Dissemination, Narration
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
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