Entertainment?Education and Elaboration Likelihood: Understanding the Processing of Narrative Persuasion

The impact of entertainment-education messages on beliefs, attitudes, and behavior is typically explained in terms of social cognitive theory principles. However, important additional insights regarding reasons why entertainment-education messages have effects can be derived from the processing of persuasive content in narrative messages. Elaboration likelihood approaches suggest that absorption in a narrative, and response to characters in a narrative, should enhance persuasive effects and suppress counterarguing if the implicit persuasive content is counterattitudinal. Also, persuasion mediators and moderators such as topic involvement should be reduced in importance. Evidence in support of these…