So I attended a campaign training session for The Greens recently – and we spent quite a bit of time talking about narrative theory and some interesting psych related aspects of campaigning.  Fascinating.  This book: ‘The Political Brain’ by Drew Westen was heavily referenced, and apparently is responsible for a major thrust of the Obama Campaign in 2008.  Whilst I haven’t (yet) read it – I started to do a little research on my own – and stumbled across some fascinating things.

Firstly – from what I can make out thus far, it would seem that encapsulating data in some form of narrative exhibits a significant effect size in terms of persuasion than were that data presented in a more ‘factual’ context.  So when we hear a story – we are more likely to be convinced of some-one’s position.  I then found this paper: ‘Entertainment-Education and Elaboration Likelihood: Understanding the Process of Narrative Persuasion’ by Slater and Rouner which talks about why this might be so – and, building on Cacioppo’s Elaboration Liklihood Model, suggests that once we engage people to an extent that they care about the protagonist and are caught up in a narrative arc – they will be engaged in more elaborative processing – with all the usual byproducts such as improved prediction of behaviour, longer lasting attitude change etc…

Furthermore – it stands to reason that this is such an effective technique since our brains are just so damned biased towards building narratives.  Our tendency to subscribe cause to the most inconsequential or unconnected things when we observe an effect – such as evidenced by the cornucopia of superstitions and myths (and even religion) we as humans have lived within for so long – surely is the result of this underlying tendency to build narrative.  Indeed our brains, if one particular purpose could be ascribed to them, are more than anything else and at every level, from the wiring of the ganglion cells in the retina – up to the highest level of neo-cortical cognition, designed to extract patterns from the chaotic welter of sensory information we gather from the world.  And a pattern, of course, is a narrative.  This happens, so that happens.  Cause and effect.

Anyway, back to the political aspects of this stuff.  As an example of the impact this thinking had on the Obama election campaign, check out his speech at the DNC in 2004.  This was the moment when he burst into the public eye and became THE candidate to beat, and (especially in the first 4 minutes) is a terrific example of using a narrative structure in order to persuade.

In fact there seems to be a whole domain of psych that looks into this kind of phenomena, namely: ‘Media Psychology’.  Fascinating.  And what’s more there is an official APA group devoted to this field and (trying to contain my excitement now) ALL IT’S NEWSLETTERS ARE DOWNLOADABLE AND FREE!!!!

And as a complete aside, whilst trawling around in research databases, I stumbled across this little nugget: A review of social science research on Facebook.  Again, I haven’t had time to read it yet – but it looks terrific…

Anyway, I have to pull out from this stuff now and continue working on my first lecture for UTS on Thursday.  “Hip Hop and indigeneity”.  Also promises to be fascinating.  I’ll stick the slides up here once I’m done.  Promise.