Narrative Intervention to Improve Decision Making
Incorporating narrative into science communication may help audiences to more fully understand and use relevant information in their own lives and behaviors. Narrative can captivate the audience, driving anticipation for plot resolution, thus becoming a self- motivating vehicle for information delivery. This quality gives narrative considerable power to explain complex phenomena and causal processes, and to create and reinforce memory traces for better recall and application over time. This talk will use examples from adolescent pregnancy prevention, vaccination, and cancer to demonstrate how narrative is relevant to understanding and intervening to improve decision making. As with all interventions, scientific evaluation of any intervention is critical to determine whether a narrative intervention is working as intended.