How Anecdotal Accounts in News and in Fiction Can Influence Judgments of a Social Problem’s Urgency, Causes, and Cures

Abstract

This study examined whether accounts about individuals in concrete situations—read as news or fiction—influenced judgments about society at large. Participants (N = 95) read either no story or one of two anecdotal accounts about a teenager who was planning to drop out of high school. Whereas one account focused on problems stemming from the student’s inner-city high school, the other account emphasized the boy’s emotional and motivational problems. Results showed that both news and fictional stories influenced participants’ judgments about the causes of and solutions to the dropout problem in the United States (causal generalization) and about the urgency with which policy makers should attend to educational and health care reform (agenda setting). Among the mechanisms shown to facilitate causal generalization was the extent to which the accounts cued remindings from the readers’ stores of personal or mediabased experience. The role of stories in the judgment of social issues is discussed.