The effect of reader-character similarity on identification and narrative persuasion

This paper investigates whether similarity between a character and the reader of a story leads to persuasive effects through identification. It is expected that readers who have the same gender as a protagonist perceive themselves as more similar to this character, identify more with the character and have beliefs that are more consistent with the story, than readers who have the other gender. To test these hypotheses, an experiment compared two versions of a story in which the protagonist was either male or female. Results showed that there were no interaction effects of the gender of the participant and the gender of the protagonist on perceived similarity, identification and beliefs. However, regression analyses showed that perceived similarity was related to certain beliefs implied by the story and that identification partially mediated this relation. Therefore, these results provide a promising base to build future research on.