How storytelling modality affects transportation and storyteller persuasion

Abstract

Stories persuade not only audiences, but their storytellers. For audiences, prior research documents modality matters: spoken stories are often more transporting and persuasive than written ones. For storytellers, we find a contrary result: storytellers are more transported and persuaded when they write rather than speak their stories. Although unpredicted by prior theory, we offer one explanation for this occurrence: structured thinking. We propose that, for storytellers, writing is better at promoting structured thinking, which facilitates storyteller transportation and persuasion. We further demonstrate that the effect of modality on the storyteller is moderated by story valence. The storyteller is persuaded in the direction of the story and thus exhibits more favorable evaluations after telling positive stories but more unfavorable evaluations after telling negative ones. These findings reveal that communication modality is an important factor in storyteller self-persuasion and open new directions for research on narratives, modality, and persuasion.