The DOI matches its Crossref record; 49 of the 49 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
How Anecdotal Accounts in News and in Fiction Can Influence Judgments of a Social Problem’s Urgency, Causes, and Cures
Abstract
This study examined whether accounts about individuals in concrete situations—read as news or fiction—influenced judgments about society at large. Participants (N = 95) read either no story or one of two anecdotal accounts about a teenager who was planning to drop out of high school. Whereas one account focused on problems stemming from the student’s inner-city high school, the other account emphasized the boy’s emotional and motivational problems. Results showed that both news and fictional stories influenced participants’ judgments about the causes of and solutions to the dropout problem in the United States (causal generalization) and about the urgency with which policy makers should attend to educational and health care reform (agenda setting). Among the mechanisms shown to facilitate causal generalization was the extent to which the accounts cued remindings from the readers’ stores of personal or mediabased experience. The role of stories in the judgment of social issues is discussed.
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Cites
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Cited by
Slater, M. D., & Rouner, D. (2002) · Communication Theory · doi:10.1111/j.1468-2885.2002.tb00265.x · Cited by 1,458
The Function of Fiction is the Abstraction and Simulation of Social Experience
Mar, R. A., & Oatley, K. (2008) · Perspectives on Psychological Science · doi:10.1111/j.1745-6924.2008.00073.x · Cited by 1,345
Using narratives and storytelling to communicate science with nonexpert audiences
Dahlstrom, M. F. (2014) · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · doi:10.1073/pnas.1320645111 · Cited by 1,159
Narratives and cancer communication
Green, M. C. (2006) · Journal of Communication · doi:10.1111/j.1460-2466.2006.00288.x · Cited by 682
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Metadata
- Authors
- Strange, J. J., & Leung, C. C.
- Venue
- Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin
- Publisher
- SAGE Publications
- Published
- 1999-04
- Volume
- 25
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 436-449
- ISSN
- 0146-1672 (ISSN-L)
- 1552-7433
- OpenAlex
- W1964251775
- Cited by
- 269
- References
- 49
- FWCI
- 48.78
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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- Strange, J. J., & Leung, C. C. (1999). How Anecdotal Accounts in News and in Fiction Can Influence Judgments of a Social Problem’s Urgency, Causes, and Cures. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167299025004004
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Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
