Ithaca College

Leigh Ann Vaughn, Associate Professor of Psychology, Kathryn Childs ('10), Claire Maschinski ('11), N. Paul Niño ('11), and Rachael Ellsworth ('11) have published an article titled, "Regulatory fit, processing fluency and narrative persuasion," in this month's issue of Social and Personality Psychology Compass.

This theoretical piece presents their regulatory fit and processing fluency approach to narrative persuasion, on which Vaughn's Social Judgment Research Team has been working for the past five years. The following is from the article’s abstract:

For millennia, people have used narratives to inform and persuade. However, little social psychological research addresses how and when narrative persuasion occurs, perhaps because narratives are complex stimuli that are difficult to vary without significantly changing the plot or characters. Existing research suggests that regulatory fit and ⁄ or processing fluency can be varied easily and in ways completely exterior to narrative content but that nonetheless affect how much narratives engage, transport, and persuade. We review research on narrative transportation and persuasion and then discuss regulatory fit and its relationship to processing fluency. Afterward, we discuss how regulatory fit and processing fluency may affect psychological engagement, transportation, and persuasion via narratives.

The research on which this paper was based was funded, in part, by an Ithaca College School of Humanities and Sciences Educational Initiative Grant. Thanks go to the following research team students for their help with earlier materials development, data collection, posters and publication about this research: Erin Abshere ('06), Nathaniel Baum ('07), Jolie Baumann ('07), Laura Candeloro ('06), Christine Dosch ('07), Colin Flynn ('07), Sarah Hesse ('06), Christine Klemann ('07), Jill Malik ('05), Nora McCaffrey ('06), Jessica Nuzzetti ('07), Melahat Ozses ('08), Zhivka Petkova ('06), Sandra Schwartz ('03), Lisa Schlessinger ('07), Bill Smith ('06), Lindsay Trudeau ('06), Adam Weber ('07), and Kumar Yogeeswaran ('06).

Social and Personality Psychology Compass is a journal that published peer-reviewed surveys of research and current thinking from across the discipline.