Green & Donahue Transportation into Narratives 1

Simulated Worlds: Transportation into Narratives

Chapter for Markman, Klein, & Suhr Handbook of Imagination and Mental Simulation

Melanie C. Green University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

John K. Donahue University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

DRAFT

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Simulated Worlds: Transportation into Narratives

Telling stories is a universal human activity. Effective storytellers can bring about comfort, joy, and excitement. Understanding and learning from stories seems to be a fundamental cognitive process. Indeed, Schank and Abelson (1995) claimed that all knowledge is stories. While this strong claim may be somewhat overstated, the power of the narrative form has been demonstrated in the judgment and decision-making literature with Pennington and Hastie's story model of jury decision-making (1988), as well as in the consumer psychology literature (e.g., Adval & Wyer, 1998; Deighton, Romer, & McQueen, 1989). There is even support from developmental studies for a weaker version of the claim that narratives are a basic mental structure; people in most cultures have an internalized narrative grammar, or understanding of story structure, by age three (Mancuso, 1986). Hearing and telling stories, then, is a form of imaginative experience that most people have beginning in early childhood and continuing throughout the lifespan. Becoming immersed in story worlds, or transported into a narrative, might be considered a guided form of mental simulation. Rather than imagining one’s own possible future or engaging in independent problem-solving, a transported individual follows the tracks laid down by an author or storyteller. The psychological theory of transportation into narrative worlds suggests that becoming immersed in a story can have powerful emotional and persuasive consequences. The theory centers on the experience of readers being transported into a text; in this state, readers’ imaginative resources have them feeling removed from their surroundings and completely

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engaged in the world created by the author (Green & Brock, 2000). We define transportation as an integrative melding of attention, imagery, and feelings, focused on story events. This chapter will describe transportation theory and research, explore how transportation is different from other forms of mental simulation, and discuss the effects of transportation on belief change. The chapter will also highlight emerging directions, such as evolutionary perspectives on immersion into narrative worlds, and the effect of transportation on the self. Transportation into Narrative Worlds Imagine a person immersed in a favorite mystery novel. This person may not hear others enter or leave a room while she is reading. She may stay up late into the night, because she does not realize how much time has gone by. Her heart may start beating faster during tense moments in the plot, or she may laugh or cry along with the main characters in the story. She may have a vivid mental image of the appearance of these characters. Being lost in a book, or what we call being transported into a narrative world, can have all of these effects and more. Transportation has long been used as a metaphor for the narrative experience, as in Emily Dickinson’s poem, “there is no frigate like a book.” Gerrig (1993) extended this metaphor in his exploration of the cognitive psychology of narratives, and Green and Brock formalized the measurement of transportation with a 15-item self-report transportation scale (Green & Brock, 2000). Example transportation scale items include “I was emotionally involved in the narrative while reading it” and “I could picture myself in the scene of the events described in the narrative.” The items tap the cognitive, emotional, and mental imagery components of transportation. Participants answer each item on a scale of 1 (not at all) to 7 (very much). The scale has shown good internal consistency, as well as discriminant and convergent validity. Specifically, the scale is correlated with measures of empathy and absorption (discussed below),

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and distinct from need for cognition. Furthermore, the scale is sensitive to story manipulations (reducing story quality by making the plot more trivial decreases transportation; see Green & Brock, 2000). Scope of transportation. Although individuals may become engaged in non-narrative media (for example, science programs), transportation per se occurs solely or primarily in response to narrative communications. Narratives present a sequence of connected events and characters, typically in a causal chain that moves from beginning to end (e.g., Bruner, 1986; Kreuter et al., 2007). In contrast, non-narrative persuasive communications present propositions or evidence in support of a claim. Although the empirical work on transportation has most frequently used written narratives (with some forays into studies of films), the mental processes involved in transportation are assumed to take place across a variety of media, including written, spoken, and filmed stories. The truth status of a narrative does not matter for transportation; individuals can be just as easily transported into a fictional narrative as a factual one. Individuals may also become transported into virtual reality worlds, although virtual reality simulations present unique narrative challenges. Inviting the reader to actually participate in a narrative world, rather than merely providing the feeling of participation, appears to require a looser narrative structure that may be less effective in creating a mental simulation of a particular sequence of events (see Biocca, 2002). The study of transportation into interactive narratives is still in the early stages (although there is a growing body of literature on feelings of “presence” in virtual worlds). Transportation and participation. Virtual reality aside, even though readers cannot actually participate in the action of a book or movie, readers often react as if they were part of story events. Gerrig (e.g., Polichak & Gerrig, 2002) refers to these reactions as “participatory

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responses” or “p-responses.” These p-responses can range from relatively automatic and reflexive “as if” responses, in which individuals respond as they would to a real situation (for example, wanting to yell, “Watch out!” when the villain is sneaking up behind the hero) to relatively more complex responses such as problem-solving (attempting to gain information from the narrative to predict outcomes) or replotting responses (mentally undoing earlier narrative events to try to change the outcome, much like counterfactual thinking in real life). The kinds of participatory responses that readers have to a narrative can affect their emotional responses, their memory for narrative events, and their real-world judgments. The joys of travel. Transportation is a pleasant state. In their free time, many people seek out compelling novels, exciting television programs, and dramatic films. (Indeed, individuals’ anger at being interrupted in the midst of a transporting story is one indication of how valued this experience can be.) However, an examination of the themes of classic stories or Best Picture winners reveals that individuals are regularly transported into narratives that evoke negative emotions such as fear, sadness, or anger. Although this “pleasure from pain” may seem paradoxical, the enjoyment of a transportation experience does not necessarily stem from the particular emotions evoked by a narrative (although individuals might indeed choose particular narratives for their mood-management effects), but instead, from the process of temporarily leaving one’s one reality behind (Green, Brock, & Kaufman, 2004). One aspect of leaving the “real world” behind is a reduction in self-focused attention. Because self-focus can be negative, particularly when individuals evaluate themselves as falling short of their standards (Duval & Wicklund, 1972), transportation into an alternative universe may provide an appealing alternative. For example, Moskalenko and Heine (2003) found that individuals who had received failure feedback (a threat to the self) in a laboratory experiment

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spent longer watching a television program immediately afterward. Furthermore, they found that in a naturalistic setting, individuals who completed questionnaires immediately after watching television showed lower self-discrepancies than those who completed the questionnaires before watching television. Although these researchers did not measure transportation per se, their findings are consistent with this function of transportation. Stepping into a narrative world appears to go beyond other activities in allowing individuals to distance themselves from selfcriticism. Theoretically, such distancing should be especially likely when individuals are not able to change self-discrepancies in other ways (e.g., by improving behavior). Transportation Compared to Other Forms of Mental Simulation Transportation resembles other forms of imagination and likely relies on some of the same basic mental processes as other types of simulation. For example, empathy (e.g., Batson, Ch. X; Epley & Caruso, ch. X; Myers & Hodges, ch. X) and transportation both require understanding other minds (e.g., Saxe, ch. X), and transporting narratives are a means of evoking vivid mental images. Nonetheless, transportation has distinct characteristics that differentiate it from related processes. Empathy. Transportation has a moderate positive correlation with empathy, as measured by the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (Davis, 1983). Transportation likely relies on some of the same fundamental cognitive processes, such as the ability to take the perspective of another person. A better understanding of the links between empathy for real others in our social world and the ability to put oneself in the shoes of a character, as transported readers do, may be a fruitful direction for future research. For example, are individuals who are more empathically accurate (e.g., Klein & Hodges, 2001) also better at understanding and becoming immersed in

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stories? (Below, we discuss studies suggesting the reverse possibility: that reading stories can improve social skills.) Absorption. Transportation also has a moderate positive correlation with Tellegen’s Absorption Scale (1982), which measures a more general tendency to become immersed in a range of experiences. Absorption is associated with susceptibility to hypnosis (e.g., Lynn, ch. X), as well as with aspects of openness to experience (particularly imaginative involvement). Flow. The subjective experience of being fully engaged in an experience and losing track of time resembles the concept of flow (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990). Flow is a type of optimal experience marked by effortless, deep concentration. In a typical flow experience, the challenge of the activity matches the skills of the individual. Although much of the research on flow focuses on more active pursuits (sports, music), Csikszentmihalyi highlights reading as the most frequent flow activity engaged in by people around the world (see Csikszentmihalyi, 1990, Ch. 6). However, flow is a more general term for absorption or engagement in an activity, and transportation highlights aspects more specific to narrative worlds, such as emotional connections, mental imagery, and potential real-world belief change. Modes of processing. Markman and McMullen (2003) present an organizing framework for understanding types of mental simulation. They propose that a division can be drawn between reflection, an experiential way of thinking that vividly simulates the self in some alternative reality, and evaluation, which involves comparing the self to an external standard. Markman and McMullen’s model is explicitly focused on comparative thinking, in which individuals are considering alternatives to a current state. Transportation could be considered a type of reflective thinking, during which individuals bring the self into the narrative world.

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Epstein’s cognitive-experiential self theory (CEST; 1990) is also a broad framework that describes two different processing modes, the cognitive (rational, conscious, and verbal) and the experiential (preconscious, automatic, and emotional). Transportation shares some common ground with the experiential mode of this theory. The experiential system relies upon emotions and encodes reality in terms of concrete images, both of which are characteristic of transported readers. Both CEST and transportation theory suggest that vivid mental images are similar to real experience. The experiential system also emphasizes a holistic approach to information processing, rather than an analytical one. This distinction echoes the differences between transportation and elaboration, as well as mirroring the reflective/evaluative dichotomy drawn by Markman and McMullen (2003), in which the reflective mode is experiential and the evaluative mode is more cognitive. However, there are also conceptual differences between transportation and the experiential mode. The experiential system is designed to “assess events rapidly and promote immediate decisive action” (p. 168). In contrast, a transported reader may linger over the experience, and is not necessarily moved to any particular action. Further, the experiential system is proposed to operate in the background of mental experience, while transportation is consciously experienced and absorbs much of one’s mental capacity. First versus third person perspective. Images, and stories themselves, can be experienced from different perspectives. Research on autobiographical memory and imagery perspective suggests that a third-person perspective (for instance, “he” or “she”) creates more psychological distance from past selves than a first-person perspective (“I” or “me”; e.g., Libby & Eibach, ch. X; Libby, Eibach, & Gilovich, 2005). However, many fictional works are written from the third person perspective, and this point of view does not appear to diminish individuals’ engagement in these stories. It appears that there is an important difference between mental simulations that

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directly involve the self (autobiographical memory or simulating one’s own future experiences) versus existing narrative worlds that a reader can enter through transportation and identification with characters. Affective forecasting. Wilson, Gilbert, and their colleagues have presented evidence that individuals are not particularly good at predicting (or mentally simulating) their future emotional states (e.g., Wilson & Gilbert, 2005). Individuals tend to overestimate the duration and intensity of their future emotions, because they fail to take into account other events that will affect their emotional state, or the cognitive processes that will act to moderate the emotions. Gilbert has suggested that examining the emotional reactions of another person who is already going through a particular experience (the experiment participant who has already chosen the particular gamble that you are considering; the fellow academic who has already earned or failed to earn tenure) will be a better predictor of one’s own emotional reactions than one’s own simulation or prediction. Narratives may serve a similar function, and might provide a good source of information for predicting future emotional consequences. A direction for future research could be to test the utility of narratives (versus information from actual persons) in affective forecasting situations Psychological Processes Underlying Transportation In the previous section, we outlined how transportation was related to (and distinct from) other forms of mental simulation. In the next section, we turn our attention to some of the psychological processes underlying the experience of being transported into a narrative world. Transportation-Imagery Model. One component of transportation is story-guided visual imagery. The transportation-imagery model (Green & Brock, 2002) highlights the role of visual imagery in transportation-based belief change. According to this model, images take on meaning

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from their role in a story. The transportation experience links the vivid images with beliefs implied by the story. This linkage may be one basis for the power of narrative-based persuasion. It may be difficult for verbal or statistical arguments to overcome the power of a mental image; even though a person may know rationally that airplane travel is quite safe, he may not be able to shake the mental picture of a plane crash (similar to the availability heuristic; Tversky & Kahneman, 1974). Additionally, over time, recalling the image may re-evoke large parts of the original communication, thus reinforcing the story-relevant beliefs. An implication of this perspective is that individuals’ imagery ability and situations that allow for the formation of rich mental images increase the persuasive power of a story. Automaticity of transportation. The extent to which transportation is under conscious control remains to be determined. Transportation requires some action on the part of the individual (reading, watching, or listening). At a minimum, the recipient must pay attention to the narrative in order to be transported into it. However, beyond merely comprehending the text, individuals may not be able to force themselves to become involved in a story that they find boring (as any high school English teacher can attest). Removing oneself from a narrative world is easier, though. Even individuals who find themselves inadvertently transported (perhaps by a trashy television program encountered while channel-surfing) can likely take themselves out of a narrative world through the use of distraction strategies (e.g., refocusing attention on events going on around them or making a conscious decision to stop watching). Experimentally, transportation can be manipulated by giving individuals instructions to focus on the surface aspects of the story, such as word choice and grammar (Green & Brock, 2000). This surface focus lowers transportation.

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Neural Basis of Transportation Although the study of the neural underpinnings of story immersion is still in its infancy, Mar (2004) provides a summary of related findings, focusing on narrative comprehension and production. Mar notes that data from both imaging and lesion studies suggest that stories activate frontal, temporal, and cingulated areas, the same areas that appear to support working memory and theory of mind processes. Mar (2004) provides several examples of fruitful new directions involving neuroscience, including studying any differences in brain activity when the text is a rich sensory experience compared to when the text is an abstract representation. Another avenue of research could examine the neuropsychological effects of the reading of a narrative text in contrast to the reading of an expository text (Mar, 2004), to better understand the nature and consequences of transportation. Influences on Transportation Not all narratives or all reading situations create a powerful sense of transportation. Rather, aspects of the individual, the narrative, and the situation can all influence the extent of immersion into a story. Primary influences on transportation include story quality, individual differences in “transportability”, the match between reader knowledge and story content, and reader goals. Typical studies investigating this question bring individuals into the lab to read a story and then rate their transportation into it (using the transportation scale described above; Green & Brock, 2000). Studies might include manipulated differences, such as altering the quality of a story or providing different reading goals, or they might include measured differences, such as pre-existing reader familiarity with settings or themes described in the story. Story quality. A major influence on the extent of transportation experienced is the quality of the narrative or text. Not surprisingly, well-written and well-structured stories are more

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transporting. Bestsellers or classic texts are rated as more transporting than stories created by psychologists for experiments, for instance (Green & Brock, 2000), and disrupting the logical order of a story has been shown to reduce transportation (Wang & Calder, 2006). Craftsmanship may also involve the use of stylistic techniques, such as metaphor, irony, or alliteration. Using literary language to defamiliarize the world in this way is known as “foregrounding” (e.g., Miall & Kuiken, 1994). These literary devices make aspects of the familiar world seem new or strange, thus allowing readers to break out of their automatic or customary ways of seeing the world and gain a deeper understanding of the human experience. For example, the phrase “a lofty midnight tunnel of smooth, sinewy branches” from the short story “The Trout” uses alliteration, the repeated “s” sound, to draw the reader’s attention to the description of the trees. Texts that use foregrounding are rated as more striking, and readers spend more time reading them (Miall & Kuiken, 1994; van Peer, 1986). Individual differences. Some individuals easily and readily leap into narrative worlds, whereas others find that stories do not hold their attention. “Transportability,” or the extent to which individuals readily become deeply transported into stories, can be measured as an individual difference (Dal Cin, Zanna, & Fong, 2004; Green, 1996). This individual difference measure of general or dispositional transportation tendencies predicts depth of actual transportation into later texts and films, as measured by the transportation scale (Green & Brock, 2000). Across studies, there is no gender difference in transportation, although men may be more transported into some kinds of stories, and women into others. Familiarity and fluency. Pre-existing familiarity with an aspect of the narrative world can increase transportation. For example, individuals who reported greater knowledge about the fraternity/sorority system were more transported into a story about a man attending his fraternity

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reunion; similarly, individuals who had homosexual friends or family members were more transported into this story, which had a homosexual protagonist (Green, 2004). Having common ground with characters or knowing something about a narrative world appears to ease the passage into that world. Vaughn and colleagues (2007) have recently provided evidence for an even more general influence on transportation. Specifically, these authors suggest that feelings of processing fluency or subjective ease may increase transportation, as long as individuals attribute those feelings to the narrative (see also Sanna, Schwarz, & Kennedy, ch. X). Any factor that creates these feelings of ease should enhance transportation. For example, individuals reading a story during the winter season that, itself, is set in wintertime, should experience greater ease of processing, because winter-related thoughts are chronically accessible during the winter season. These readers should be more transported into the winter narrative than those who read the winter story in the summertime. Vaughn’s studies support this hypothesis, and have shown similar effects using a misattribution paradigm (Vaughn et al., 2007). Reader goals or pre-reading instructions. As noted above, goals that focus a reader on surface aspects of the story (e.g, proofreading) can reduce transportation (Green & Brock, 2000). Whether or not the story was freely chosen might also affect transportation; readers who feel that it was their choice to read or watch a narrative may enjoy it more than those who were compelled to do so by some external force, such as a class assignment or family obligation (cf. ShedloskyShoemaker, Brock, & Costabile, 2007). Transportation and Belief Change The effects of being transported do not end at the borders of the narrative world. Rather, transportation is a key mechanism of narrative-based persuasion.

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Transportation may aid in belief change in three ways. First, transportation reduces counterarguing about the issues raised in the story. Individuals transported into a compelling narrative world may not have the cognitive resources to counterargue story implications, or may not be motivated to disrupt the enjoyable transportation experience by quibbling with the author’s claims (Escalas, 2004; Green & Brock, 2000). Next, transportation may affect beliefs by making narrative events seem more like personal experience. If a reader or viewer feels as if she has been part of narrative events, the lessons implied by those events may seem more powerful (Green, 2004). Finally, attachment to characters may play a critical role in narrative-based belief change. If a viewer likes or identifies with a character (see Bandura, 1986; Singhal, Cody, Rogers, & Sabido, 2003), statements made by the character or implications of events experienced by that character may carry special weight. Fiction versus nonfiction. As noted above, individuals may be transported into both factual and fictional narratives. Transportation does not depend on whether a narrative reflects real-world truth; rather, individuals appear to seek plausibility rather than strict accuracy in their narratives. Indeed, labeling a story as fiction can be a cue to readers to engage in more immersive, less critical processing (Green, Garst, & Brock, 2004). A growing body of research suggests that fictional narratives can often be just as powerful as factual ones in changing beliefs. For example, Strange and Leung (1999) showed that narratives could change readers’ beliefs about the causes of students dropping out of high school, regardless of whether those narratives were described as news articles or as fictional stories. Green and Brock (2000) showed changes in both specific and general beliefs related to a story about an attack on a small child at a shopping mall; these changes occurred even when the

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narrative was clearly described as fiction. Marsh and colleagues (Marsh, Meade, & Roediger, 2003) have shown that individuals learn “false facts” from fiction. The ability of fiction to persuade is somewhat counterintuitive when viewed against the backdrop of traditional persuasion research; after all, who would alter their worldview in response to a false advertisement? However, the finding that individuals easily entertain and learn from these possible worlds makes more sense when viewed in the context of other forms of mental simulation. Individuals readily imagine possible future outcomes, and these simulated futures can guide their behavior (e.g., Markman, Ozmen, & Zell, ch. X; Oettingen, ch. X). In the same way, fictional stories may in some sense be a more structured means of considering future or alternative events. Counterfactuals. Transportation can lead to other types of mental simulation. For example, transported individuals may generate counterfactual alternatives to an unhappy ending of a story. This counterfactual thinking can enhance the persuasive power of the narrative (TalOr, Boninger, Poran, & Gleicher, 2004; see also Gerrig, 1993). Applications of transportation theory. Narratives can be a persuasive force in a variety of domains. Transportation theory has been applied to marketing, health, and political settings. For example, consumer psychology research shows that individuals who mentally simulate experience with products (imagining themselves wearing a pair of running shoes) are transported, and thus show reduced critical thinking and a more positive attitude toward the advertisement and the product (Escalas, 2004). Transportation is also relevant to health communications, and may underlie some of the effects observed in entertainment-education, a technique that embeds health messages in stories (radio programs, telenovelas; see Slater, 2002, and Singhal, Cody, Rogers, & Sabido, 2003 for

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reviews). Researchers and public health officials have used narratives about topics ranging from safe sex to adult education in the hope of changing attitudes and behaviors (Singhal & Rogers, 1999). For instance, after the broadcast of Acompaname (Come Along with Me), a Mexican telenovela (soap opera) focused on family planning issues, visits to family-planning clinics increased by 32% (Institute for Communication Research, 1981, cited in Slater, 2002). Entertainment-education has been used most often in developing nations, but there is growing interest in the use of narratives for changing health beliefs in the United States. For example, narratives can be used to encourage health screenings and healthy behaviors (e.g., Green, 2006; Kreuter et al., 2007). Television narratives about controversial contemporary issues such as the death penalty have been shown to reduce resistance to attitude change that stems from prior liberal/conservative ideology (Slater, Rouner, & Long, 2006). On a broader level, over time, transportation may contribute to cultivation effects, in which individuals’ beliefs come to reflect the somewhat-skewed vision of the world as reflected in television portrayals, rather than the real world (e.g., higher crime rates; cf. Shrum, Burroughs, & Rindfleish, 2005). Transported individuals may be especially likely to integrate televised portrayals into their real lives. Transportation and Social Skills The ease with which individuals relate to story characters may be a natural extension of individuals’ ability to understand real others in the social world (see Zunshine, 2006). Transportation draws upon individuals’ natural tendency toward empathy and perspective-taking. An intriguing new line of research has explored the possibility that reading narrative fiction may actually help develop these social skills as well. Mar and colleagues (Mar, Oatley, Hirsh, de la Paz, & Peterson, 2006) found that lifetime exposure to fiction was a positive predictor of

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measures of social ability, such as perceiving the mental states of others. Nonfiction reading (e.g., philosophy, business, self-help) showed no such benefits. These authors suggest that understanding characters in a fictional world provides parallels to understanding real interaction partners. Thus, contrary to the stereotype of “bookworms” as socially awkward, becoming transported into narrative worlds may in fact equip individuals to more successfully navigate real social interactions. An implication of this research is that the simulations provided by quality fiction may take people beyond the knowledge they could gain through their own self-created simulations of social interactions. These findings raise the interesting question of whether some types of fiction are better than others at improving social ability. In other words, are readers of classic literature preparing themselves for social success to a greater extent than the people who pick up a formulaic thriller? Or is the process of engaging in a narrative world – any narrative world – and attempting to understand the people, relationships, and situations presented there sufficient to hone social abilities? Future research should address these important questions. Transportation and the Self Another potential extension for transportation research is to consider the effects of transportation on the self, beyond changing attitudes and beliefs about external objects (see Green, 2005). Just as transportation creates openness to new beliefs and attitudes about the world, it may also allow people to explore new possible selves (Oyserman, ch. X). Narratives provide an especially low-risk way of trying on alternative selves. Individuals can imagine what it would be like to be a fighter pilot, a homeless person, or a multimillionaire without actually getting behind the wheel of a plane, sleeping on the streets, or winning the lottery. Characters may also provide role models for desired future selves. To the extent that a story can provide

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specific pathways to goals (for example, showing how a character overcame a particular obstacle, such as quitting smoking or overcoming prejudice), it may be especially effective in motivating individuals to reach a desired future self, and may increase individuals’ optimism about their ability to achieve their goals (Klein & Zajac, ch. X). Stories do not necessarily need to evoke change; they may provide new perspectives that allow increased understanding of one’s current self. This function of narratives may be especially valuable when individuals experience life events that evoke extreme emotions (e.g., the death of a loved one; divorce). Oatley (1999), following Scheff (1979), suggested that theoretically, narratives may provide a middle ground where emotions are experienced strongly enough for their meaning to be understood, but not so intensely that they overwhelm the reader. Narratives provide a safe space for individuals to explore the implications of their emotional experiences. Because the emotions evoked through reading are a result of events happening to characters, rather than to the individual, readers may feel freer to express those emotions. A reader who feels sadness for the end of a character’s relationship may then be able to link these feelings back to his own life. Evolutionary Approaches to Transportation Given the influence of stories and transportation in a variety of social domains, it is worthwhile to explore the potential evolutionary basis of transportation and storytelling. While stories have not been a primary focus of evolutionary psychology, some lines of evolutionary theorizing may shed light on how humans developed the capacity for constructing and becoming transported into imagined worlds. Stories from religious beliefs and theory of mind. The emergence of stories may have begun with shamanistic or early religious beliefs resulting from an expansion of the concept of

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theory of mind (Boyer, 2001). For Boyer (2001), religious beliefs are theorized to stem from two constraints: a salience constraint and an inferential constraint. The salience constraint stresses that the belief must be conspicuous: drawing attention to its novelty, often by breaking the laws of nature. The representation is circumscribed to some extent by the inferential constraint: inferences must be allowed as to the intention of the object or agent. A storyteller, through an expansive theory of mind, could place herself in the mind of an agent or object. For example, a storyteller could claim that a river has talked to her (salience constraint), and the fact that the river spoke is a sign that the hunting season will not be fruitful this year (inferential constraint). Thus, the storyteller, through an expansive theory of mind, can bring meaning to the community. This meaning-making ability could then be extended to other contexts. In the prehistoric period, humans may initially have attempted to understand phenomena such as fertility through stories ascribing personality characteristics to unseen characters. Festinger (1983) suggests that those who can bring meaning to the community by discerning supernatural phenomena would become the elite. Perhaps effective storytellers, who could create meaning by telling stories about such subjects as gods in conflict, would have had an advantage in prehistoric society. Examining the content of literature through the lens of evolutionary psychology, Pinker (1997) argues that the goals of literary characters are Darwinian: either to survive or reproduce. Indeed, Buss (1999) states that, “It is probably no coincidence that the most successful novels and movies such as Titanic and Gone With the Wind contain patterns of intrasexual competition, mate choice, romance, and life-threatening hostile forces of nature” (p. 410). An interesting empirical question is whether stories that are more closely linked to issues of survival or reproduction are also more transporting.

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Fiction as an adaptation to the social world. Oatley and Mar (2005) hypothesize that fiction is a progression of evolutionary adaptations for attempting to understand the social world, and that these adaptations are reflected in the features of characters offered in contemporary stories. While conceding that fiction is not true, these authors argue that: “[fiction is] nonetheless it is a model, a useful simulation, of selves in the social world…. [These models are] molded by culture to provide the contexts for oral storytelling and more recently written literature” (p. 180). Drawing upon the work of others, Oatley and Mar (2005) provide a framework to explain the development of language, with pre-verbal imitation beginning approximately 1.9 million years ago by the human ancestor of homo erectus. Humans continue to possess this imitation ability that permits an understanding of the actions and emotions of another, facilitating narrative’s capacity to describe one’s actions to the self and to others through language. Dunbar (2004) argues recursion is necessary for narrative, with Oatley and Mar (2005) summarizing the three levels of recursion as: A conversationalist or story-teller must know (1) that the hearer can know (2) what a person in the story knows (3). We take simulation together with its recursive aspects to be important steps towards the more explicit simulations of fiction, which requires a further increase of abstraction, to depict people who may never have existed or acted in the ways depicted (p.184) Oatley and Mar (2005) maintain that evolution provided the use of mental models of others, the conveyance of conversational narratives, and metaphor; then culture, and more specifically the writers within culture, developed a “theory of character” with more depth. Skilled writers can move beyond a description of external actions of a character in narrative fiction to describe the inner consciousness of the character. In sum, Oatley and Mar (2005) state that a comprehension of a narrative character’s inner state likely involves a process related to understanding a real person: an adaptive process like language and metaphor.

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Transportation into Immortality Nell (2002) provides another evolutionary rationale for stories. He states that individuals have to forget their own mortality in order to function, and that narratives can accomplish the suspension of knowledge of one’s mortality because stories have the common element of a protagonist overcoming a challenge involving possible death (Nell, 2002). Nell argues that all cultures have narratives with the same essential structure: a hero’s call to adventure, “undergoing a supreme ordeal at the nadir of his journey, and finally re-emerging from the kingdom of dread to redeem the world” (Nell, 2002, p. 20; see also Campbell, 1949). Nell believes that current narratives involve “domestication” of older narratives so that immortality is “tamed” as hopefulness. He notes the inconsistency that “if all readers were deathdefying optimists, the extraction of hope from narrative would be psychologically redundant” (Nell, 2002, p. 21), and argues that readers of both fictional stories as well as news stories seek hope from a narrative in order to suspend the fact that death is inescapable. This perspective is consistent with the general ideas of terror management theory (Greenberg, Pyszczynski, & Solomon, 1986; Solomon, Greenberg, & Pyszczynski, 2007). Selection Benefits from Narrative Also from an evolutionary standpoint, the display hypothesis proposes a reason for why art is created. According to this hypothesis, men perform their art in public (e.g., singing) in order to impress others and gain greater access to women (Miller, 1998). However, the display hypothesis fails to account for the many people who enjoy experiencing art in a solitary manner (Buss, 1999). The psychology of narrative provides a possible answer: the artist may be more attractive because the people who enjoy the art are fully immersed, or transported by the quality of the product, resulting in cognitive, affective and imagery involvement.

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Good artistry may affect a reader’s judgment of the artist as a potential mate by prompting immersion from physical surroundings and inducing other psychological effects, such as positive emotion or arousal/excitement. Stories and other kinds of art may signal other desirable traits. Psychologists have determined that intelligence and empathy are important to potential mates (Buss & Barnes, 1986). Art, in the form of good literature or storytelling ability, may suggest an intelligent author, and the perspective-taking in stories might serve a similar function for displaying empathy. Research by Haselton and Miller (2006) suggests that women desire the benefits of industriousness and creativity to varying degrees because industriousness signals the benefits of a “good dad,” while creativity indicates “good genes,” genes that will help increase reproductive success. In terms of evolutionary advantage, literary skill or storytelling ability might have been more valued in men because the ability might have indicated good genetic quality. On the other hand, storytelling may also have been useful in gaining resources (for instance, if it were used to persuade others or to gain higher status in a community). Future research should test some of these possible explanations for the development of story-telling skill. Conclusions Transportation into a narrative world is a form of immersive, imaginative engagement in a story. Transportation shares some qualities with other forms of mental simulation – a transported individual entertains possibilities beyond literal reality, forms mental images, and experiences emotional reactions in response to simulated events. However, a key difference between transportation and other forms of mental simulation is the guided nature of the experience. Individuals are not creating their own simulated worlds from scratch, but rather, are following along the narrative trails blazed by an author. If the author is skillful, these simulated

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worlds may be even richer and more detailed than a mental simulation that a person might develop on their own. Transportation is also likely to lead to real-world belief change; transported individuals learn from the experiences of characters and may integrate the lessons from story events into their own belief systems. Transportation theory suggests several exciting areas for future research. Transportation has been explored in the context of health communications, and a future priority would be to uncover what specific aspects of transportation are most conducive to improving societal concerns. Another research direction might address how narratives can help overcome common biases. For example, the affective forecasting literature suggests that individuals overestimate the duration and intensity of their future emotional states, but (transporting) stories may be a means of overcoming these misprediction biases. Furthermore, advances in neuroscience techniques and evolutionary theorizing may provide new insights into the nature and origin of transportation into narrative worlds.

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