Storytelling and Narrative Transportation as a Catalyst for Self-Efficacy and Action in the Face of Climate Change

What the evidence shows

This experimental study tests whether reading a climate change story increases readers’ self-efficacy — their confidence that they understand and can act on the topic — and examines which story features (ending valence, fictionality, verisimilitude, collective identity) and reader traits (self-involvement) drive “narrative transportation,” the sense of being imaginatively absorbed in a story.

The researchers built on Bandura’s self-efficacy theory and the attributional reformulation of learned helplessness, framing climate anxiety not as an end state but as an emotion that can be redirected toward action when paired with a sense of controllability. Using a single fictional/nonfictional debate narrative manipulated across four dimensions, they tested twelve hypotheses about how these variables shape self-efficacy, content interest, and climate anxiety.

The design is notable for climate communications because it isolates specific, manipulable craft choices (how vivid the description is, whether the story is framed as true, whether the ending is hopeful or bleak) rather than testing broad message “frames.” The sample was a single-university, single-major (agriculture) student population in the U.S., which bounds how far the findings can be generalized.

Key Findings

• Verisimilitude (rich, sensory description) was the strongest driver of narrative transportation among the tested story features — high vs. low verisimilitude produced a 9.29-point difference on narrative transportation, and was a significant positive predictor in the regression model.

• Reader self-involvement (a combination of personal worry and self-relevance) also significantly increased narrative transportation, while collective identity (setting the story at the reader’s own university vs. an unfamiliar one) and fictionality had no significant direct effect on transportation.

• Fictionality moderated the link between narrative transportation and self-efficacy: self-efficacy rose with narrative transportation only when the story was framed as nonfiction; for stories framed as fiction, the relationship reversed.

• Story ending (optimistic vs. pessimistic) had no significant effect on self-efficacy, content interest, or climate anxiety — outcomes appeared to be shaped more by the reading experience overall than by how the story concluded.

Stand-out data points

• +28%: self-efficacy gain from a single story. Confidence in understanding and explaining climate change rose sharply after one ~10-minute reading, regardless of which version participants read.

• +9.3 points: verisimilitude’s lift on narrative transportation. Rich sensory detail (vs. sparse description) was the single largest story-level driver of immersion in the study.

• r = .61: narrative transportation’s correlation with content interest. Transportation was strongly linked to how meaningful, valuable, and worth sharing readers found the story — far stronger than its link to self-efficacy (r = .12, not significant) or anxiety (r = .22).

Examples of how Understories uses this research

• Actionability Findings caution that transportation alone does not build self-efficacy; messages should pair vivid narrative with concrete, controllable next steps to convert engagement into confidence.

• Emotional resonance Verisimilitude (rich, sensory, specific description) is empirically linked to deeper narrative transportation — supports scoring messages higher when they use concrete sensory detail over abstraction.

• Personal relevance Self-involvement (personal worry + self-relevance) significantly increased narrative transportation — supports scoring messages higher when they connect to the reader’s own stakes or identity.

• Non-maleficence The finding that anxiety rose modestly with narrative transportation (r = .22) is a signal Understories should surface: message content that is highly immersive is not automatically safe, and advocates should pair immersive storytelling with efficacy-building content to avoid stoking unproductive anxiety.

non-exhaustive

Key quote

Self-efficacy “increased with narrative transportation if stories were presented as non-fiction.”

© Paymard, P., Ellis, G., & Briers, G.,open access journal published by the American Association for Agricultural Education.

Library entry updated: 5 October 2026