The prevalent use of images employed by strategic communicators within messages, combined with a lack of empirical evidence of the vividness effect, prompted this study to examine how information portrayed through different types of messages (narrative or statistics) and visual representations (image or no image) would affect persuasion. While it was predicted narratives would be more persuasive than statistical messages, the results of this study indicate narrative messages are neither more nor less persuasive than statistical messages, when employing a pro-social topic.
A second goal of this study was to examine how message type impacted the variables vividness, transportation, affect, and credibility.
The results of the current study revealed narratives were perceived as more vivid, sad, and transporting than statistical messages; whereas, statistical messages were perceived as having greater credibility and produced more fear and surprise than narratives.
Transportation, involvement, and vividness were not found to mediate the relationship between message type and persuasion.
