Persuasive Narratives about Osteoporosis: Effects of Protagonist Competence, Narrator Point of View, and Subjective Risk

Narratives have been widely acknowledged as a powerful persuasion tool in health promotion and education. Recently, great efforts have been devoted to identifying message components and causal pathways that maximize a narrative's persuasion power. Specifically, we investigated how narrator point of view and readers' subjective relative risk moderate the effects of protagonist competence on intentions to adopt osteoporosis-prevention behaviors, and proposed identification with the protagonist, self-referencing, and fear arousal as three mediators explaining the effect. Women aged 35 to 55, still young enough to reduce osteoporosis risk, read a narrative in which the 60-year-old female character reflects on either taking actions to prevent osteoporosis (competent protagonist) or failing to do so, resulting in osteoporosis (incompetent protagonist) (N = 563). The narratives were told from either the first- or third-person point of view. We found that women who perceived themselves to be at lower risk for developing osteoporosis relative to their peers identified more with the competent protagonist. For women at higher perceived risk, the competent and incompetent protagonists elicited similar levels of identification. Identification was higher when the protagonist's story was told from the first-person perspective, but only for the incompetent protagonist narrative. Identification, self-referencing, and fear arousal played important mediating roles. Implications for theory development and practice are examined.