What a Story Adds to a Price

Answer to the question

What does narrative value add to a price?

Reliably it changes how an object feels, and unreliably what anybody pays for it. The famous twenty-eight-fold figure, 128 dollars and 74 cents of thrift-store objects resold for 3,612 dollars and 51 cents, comes from a literary project with no control condition and self-selected bidders. The one verified incentive-compatible money test of a production story found about 17 per cent, on a bar of soap.

Key takeaways

• The Significant Objects project bought 100 thrift-store objects for 128 dollars and 74 cents and resold them for 3,612 dollars and 51 cents, with no control condition and no randomisation.
• Its own Experimental Results page holds a significance rank running from 1 to 100, not prices.
• The one verified incentive-compatible money test put handmade soap at 6 dollars and 56 cents against 5 dollars and 63 cents, about 17 per cent, for a two-word production cue rather than a narrative.
• In the field's own meta-analysis, narrative transportation correlates about .57 with affective response, .44 with attitude and .31 with intention, and no price outcome appears anywhere.
• Braddock and Dillard found five studies measuring a behaviour, on 978 people between them, and not one measured a price.

One hundred thrift-store objects bought for 128 dollars and 74 cents sold for 3,612 dollars and 51 cents. That is the figure the marketing trade reaches for whenever it wants to put a number on narrative value, and it is roughly a twenty-eight-fold return on outlay. The figure is real, the people who produced it were open about what they had done, and it is still not evidence that a story raises a price. The honest measure of narrative value is smaller, harder to find, and strongest on how an object feels rather than on what anyone pays, while the money question has barely been asked.

The rest of this article shows why. The strongest money test anyone has run on something story-shaped moved a bar of soap by about 17 per cent. The one meta-analysis that pooled behaviour found stories moved what people did by more than what they believed, which is a finding we did not want. And the newest and largest meta-analysis, 377 findings from 77 experiments, reports that narratives may be only slightly more persuasive than non-narrative messages.

What did the thrift-store project do?

The Significant Objects project was run by Rob Walker, a journalist who writes on material culture, and Joshua Glenn, author of Taking Things Seriously. Their published design was simple. Buy objects from thrift stores for no more than a few dollars. Pair each object with a writer. Put the writer's invented story on eBay in place of a factual description, with the author's byline attached. Send the winner the object and a printout of the story, and the proceeds to the writer.

The first phase ran from July to November 2009, with 100 objects and stories by Sheila Heti, Nicholson Baker, Colson Whitehead, Jonathan Lethem and ninety-six others. The curators state the result in one line of their own: they sold 128 dollars and 74 cents worth of thrift-store junk for 3,612 dollars and 51 cents. Two later phases raised 4,351 dollars and 50 cents for literary charities and produced a book.

Read as a publishing venture, it worked beautifully.

Why is that figure not evidence?

Start with the curators' own conclusion, which is conditional, not declarative:

> If an increase in the thrift-store objects' "value in trade" can be accepted as objective evidence of an increase in the objects' significance, then our hypothesis was 100 per cent correct.

No object was ever listed twice, once with a story and once with a plain description. There is no control condition anywhere in the design, so nothing separates the story from the event it was part of.

The bidders also chose to be there. The project kept a press-clippings page, was covered by NPR and Slate, and listed contributors including William Gibson, Meg Cabot and Bruce Sterling. What a winner received was partly a signed piece of short fiction by a named author, which is not the same good as a thrift-store ashtray, so any estimate of narrative value drawn from those auctions is partly an estimate of what a limited-edition story by a recognisable writer fetches.

Then there is the table. The page headed "Experimental Results" contains no prices at all. It holds a "Significance Value" running from 1 to 100, which is a rank, alongside after-the-fact codings of object type and a "Narrative Mode" marked hot or cool. It is a catalogue, not a dataset with a dependent variable.

Who turned it into a study?

Not the curators. The trade's framings include Entrepreneur on how the project proved the economic value of storytelling, LinkedIn's marketing blog under the experiment that proves the value of stories, and a Medium piece headed "Quantifying the value of storytelling". The most-cited demonstration of narrative value in commerce is a literary project that used eBay as a publishing platform, and the marketing world has spent fifteen years calling it an experiment.

Walker and Glenn called it quasi-anthropological, published their design, their conditional wording and every figure. They did not claim a controlled study. The trade did that for them.

The randomised version does exist. Michael Hiscox and colleagues auctioned fresh roasted coffee on eBay with and without a randomised Fair Trade label, and report a premium of 23 per cent. It is a working paper, not a peer-reviewed article, and it tests a certification claim, not a narrative. Its value here is as the design Significant Objects did not have: same platform, same goods, randomised wording, real bids.

What happens when real money is at stake?

One study puts a genuine incentive behind a story about how a thing was made. In the fourth study of Christoph Fuchs and colleagues' 2015 paper on the handmade effect, 302 United States consumers were recruited from an online panel in the week before Mother's Day, reduced to 263 after 39 said their mother was no longer alive, which the authors state annulled the incentive compatibility of the task. Participants saw a bar of French milled soap described either as handmade or as machine-made, and named a maximum price under a Becker, DeGroot and Marschak lottery, a device that makes misreporting your true value costly.

The handmade description averaged 6 dollars and 56 cents, the machine-made 5 dollars and 63 cents. The authors describe that as a 17 per cent increase, mediated by a perception that the production process had imbued the soap with love, and the mediation survives when authenticity, pride, happiness and contentment are entered as controls. Their reason for running it convicts most of this literature, because the earlier measures,

> while informative, did not involve consequential decisions and did not involve a dollar metric.

Note what was manipulated, though. Two words about production. Not a narrative. A cue about effort is a different lever, and we take it up in [what showing the work actually does](https://thewhyweproject.com/articles/what-showing-the-work-actually-does).

The closest thing to an origin story tested on real money is Crystal Eustice and colleagues' 2019 auction on 143 wine tourists intercepted at cellar doors, again with a Becker, DeGroot and Marschak design. The full text never reached us, only the abstract by way of search retrieval, so what we can report is a ranking and no figure. Award messages produced the highest willingness to pay, local-production messages a modest gain, sensory messages no measurable effect. The origin message lost to a plain quality signal.

The strongest real-money result here is not about narrative at all. George Newman and Paul Bloom analysed final bids from three estate auctions and found that expectations about physical contact between object and celebrity predicted higher bids for items belonging to well-liked people, John F. Kennedy among them, and lower bids for the disliked, Bernard Madoff among them. In a follow-up, people said they would pay less for a liked celebrity's sweater if it were sterilised first, and more for a disliked celebrity's. The publisher's full text would not open for us, and the abstract we did read carries no figure we could print.

The mechanism the authors propose is a belief that essence transfers by touch. An object's history can move a real price. That is provenance, not storytelling. The study this article ought to have been about, a published and peer-reviewed randomised test adding or withholding a narrative with a real transaction price as the outcome, is one we looked for in price and willingness-to-pay experiments, in auction designs, in retail tests of story against plain descriptions and in provenance auctions, and did not find.

Where does the rest of the evidence land?

It lands mostly on feelings. Tom van Laer and colleagues pooled 132 effect sizes from 76 papers on narrative transportation, the state of being absorbed into a story. The reliability-adjusted correlation with affective response is about .57, the largest figure in their table. With attitude it is about .44. With intention it falls to about .31, across nine effect sizes and 1,129 people. No price or willingness-to-pay outcome appears anywhere in that meta-analysis.

Their biggest single moderator is about measurement, not about stories. Studies using Green and Brock's transportation scale returned about .34, across 127 effect sizes and 20,620 participants. Studies using a different scale returned about .56, on five effect sizes and 588 participants. The authors note the gap disappeared once affective-response effects were taken out.

Then the finding we went looking for and would rather not have found. Kurt Braddock and James Price Dillard's 2016 meta-analysis is the only one here that reaches behaviour, and behaviour is its largest result. Beliefs pooled at about .17, attitudes at about .19, intentions at about .17, and behaviours at about .23. On the pooled record a story shifts what people do by a little more than it shifts what they think.

Two things stop it settling the question. The behaviour cell is five studies on 978 people, where beliefs and attitudes rest on nearly forty studies and seven thousand people each, so it is the thinnest estimate in the paper and the one most likely to move. And none of the five measured a price. The often-quoted tally of 64 articles and 138 effect sizes belongs to van Laer, Feiereisen and Visconti's 2019 follow-up on digital moderators, and the two meta-analyses are routinely swapped.

The field's own 2024 review says the rest out loud. Veronica Thomas and Jamie Grigsby examined 95 peer-reviewed articles and found that of the sixty which built transportation into the design, almost all only measured it instead of manipulating it, and two thirds treated it as a mediator. Their outcomes table lists intentions, choice, word of mouth and willingness to help, and holds no price, spend or payment outcome of any kind.

And a second qualification, which bears on the first. Bardia Rahmani and colleagues, in 2025, pooled 377 findings from 77 experiments on narrative radio, television and film. Their headline is positive: narrative entertainment is quite influential, with sizeable effects still apparent weeks after exposure. Then they report that head-to-head tests, though inconclusive, suggest narratives may be only slightly more persuasive than non-narrative messages, which would mean a story's main advantage is its ability to attract and engage large and diverse audiences. The last author there is Donald Green, a different person from Melanie Green of the transportation model.

That is a claim about attention rather than about narrative value, and attention is not a premium.

Do stories really switch off scrutiny?

Both sides have a real case. For suppression: Melanie Green and Timothy Brock's second experiment, on 69 readers, found that the most transported readers noticed fewer false notes in a story than the least transported did. Jennifer Edson Escalas, sole author of the canonical advertising paper on this, built a model in which transportation "includes strong affective responses and low levels of critical thought, which, in turn, affect ad attitudes and brand evaluations". And van Laer and colleagues' critical-thought coefficient is about minus .20 across seven effect sizes and 2,373 participants, the only negative figure in their table.

Against it: Thomas and Grigsby report that reduced counterarguing arrives alongside high cognitive effort, not instead of it, which they call a surprising combination of effects. You are working hard while reading a story, just not at objecting. Their review also records that story format can itself activate persuasion knowledge, so some readers turn sceptical; that a warning about manipulative intent has been used to reduce transportation; and that where perceived risk ran high, consumers processed analytically.

Both are right, and size decides the practical question. The suppression effect is the oldest finding in the field and it is real, but at about minus .20 it is the weakest consequence in the meta-analysis, its own authors flag it as less significant than the others, and it reverses in sceptical or high-risk readers. A story buys a seller a few seconds of unexamined goodwill. It does not buy a suspension of judgement, and claiming otherwise flatters marketers while insulting readers.

Jonah Berger's Contagious supplies the vocabulary for this in chapter six, where the instruction is to build your own Trojan Horse: put the brand in the load-bearing part of a narrative, because retelling strips whatever is not structural, so information travels under the guise of idle chatter. That is a good editorial test. The chapter supplies the framing for this article and nothing else: no finding and no figure here comes from it. The same caution runs through [how much recommendations really sell](https://thewhyweproject.com/articles/how-much-recommendations-really-sell) and [the boring product people talk about](https://thewhyweproject.com/articles/the-boring-product-people-talk-about): a device that moves talk is not therefore a device that moves money.

So keep the two claims apart, and keep them honest. On the controlled evidence a story reliably changes how an object feels and moves behaviour on five studies nobody should lean on. The twenty-eight-fold markup everybody quotes measures the crowd that turned up, the famous byline on the paperwork and the novelty of the moment, and not the sentence on the label.

Common questions

What does narrative value add to a price?

Less than the trade claims, and it is barely measured. The one incentive-compatible money test found a 17 per cent premium for a two-word handmade description on a bar of soap. Pooled across the literature, stories move feelings most, and behaviour by about .23 on only five studies. No meta-analysis here reports a price outcome. Narrative value is best evidenced on feeling and barely measured on money.

Is the Significant Objects project a real experiment?

It is a literary project that used eBay as a publishing platform, and its curators described it as quasi-anthropological. No object was listed both with and without a story, so there is no control condition. Bidders chose to join a publicised event, winners received a signed story by a named author, and the results page holds a one-to-one-hundred rank where the prices should be.

Does a story stop people thinking critically?

Only slightly, and not always. Transported readers do notice fewer false notes, and the pooled effect on critical thought is negative, but it is the weakest consequence in the meta-analysis and its own authors say so. The 2024 review documents the reverse case too, where story format makes readers suspect persuasion and turn more sceptical, not less.

Why do marketers quote the twenty-eight-fold figure?

Because it is vivid, it is published, and it is easy to mistake for a measurement of narrative value. The curators were open about their design and their conditional wording, and the word experiment was attached to it by the trade press, not by them. Nothing in the project separates the story from the publicity, the famous byline, the novelty or the self-selected bidders.

Sources

Walker, R., & Glenn, J. (2009 to 2012). The Significant Objects Project. Curators' own About page at significantobjects.com/about/ and Experimental Results page at significantobjects.com/experimental-results/. [BOTH PAGES READ IN FULL by web_fetch.] NOT A STUDY AND NEVER CITED AS ONE. Design in the curators' words: a writer invents a story about an object, and the theory is tested via eBay. The curators describe volume one as 'a quasi-anthropological experiment' whose hypothesis was 'Narrative transforms insignificant objects into significant ones'. Published parameters: objects bought for no more than a few dollars from thrift stores and garage sales; one writer paired with one object; the fictional story used on eBay in place of a factual description, with the author's byline attached and care taken to avoid the impression the story was true, because hoaxing would 'void our test'; the winning bidder received the object plus a printout of the story, and net proceeds went to the writer. REAL NUMBERS, all the curators' own: first phase July to November 2009, 100 objects, stories by Sheila Heti, Nicholson Baker, Lydia Millet, Colson Whitehead, Jonathan Lethem and 95 others, result stated as 'We sold $128.74 worth of thrift-store junk for $3,612.51', roughly a twenty-eight-fold return; second phase, volume two of 50 stories raising $2,244.11 for 826 National and volume three of 50 raising $1,748.82 for Girls Write Now, plus an epistolary week for One Story and a Litquake week for Root Division, 'in all, our various second-phase efforts raised $4,351.50 for worthy, lit-related entities'; third phase, 2012, a Fantagraphics book of 100 stories. WHY IT IS NOT EVIDENCE: no object was ever listed twice, once with a story and once without, so there is no control condition; the bidders selected themselves into a publicised literary event with a press-clippings page, NPR and Slate coverage and famous bylines, and a winner received partly a signed piece of short fiction; novelty and publicity are confounded with the manipulation throughout; and the Experimental Results table contains no prices, only a 'Significance Value' running 1 to 100, which is a rank, alongside post-hoc codings of object type, significance type and a 'Narrative Mode' marked hot or cool. THE FINDING ABOUT THE FINDING, which is the article's hook: the trade cites it as proof, in framings including Entrepreneur's 'How the Significant Objects Social Experiment Proved the Economic Value of Storytelling', LinkedIn's marketing blog under 'The experiment that proves the value of stories', and a Medium piece headed 'Quantifying the value of storytelling'. Rob Walker and Joshua Glenn are living people who published their design, their conditional wording and their figures openly; the project is described accurately as journalism and literary publishing rather than science, and no intent of any kind is imputed to either of them.

Fuchs, C., Schreier, M., & van Osselaer, S. M. J. (2015). 'The Handmade Effect: What's Love Got to Do with It?' Journal of Marketing, 79(2), 98-110. doi:10.1509/jm.14.0018. [FULL TEXT READ, from the author copy hosted at WU Vienna.] THE ARTICLE'S ANCHOR AND THE ONLY VERIFIED INCENTIVE-COMPATIBLE MONEY TEST OF A PRODUCTION STORY. Fuchs first at TUM School of Management, Schreier second at WU Vienna, van Osselaer last at Cornell. Study 4: 302 United States consumers recruited from an online panel in the week before Mother's Day, reduced to a final 263 after 39 were removed because they said their mother was no longer alive, which the authors state 'annull[ed] the incentive compatibility of the task'. Production mode, handmade against machine-made, manipulated between participants on a bar of Le Serail French milled soap. Willingness to pay elicited on a zero to 15 dollar sliding scale using an incentive-compatible Becker, DeGroot and Marschak lottery with a superimposed 15-dollar prize lottery. RESULT: handmade mean $6.56 against machine-made $5.63, which the authors describe twice as a 17 per cent increase. Mediated by perceived love symbolically imbued in the product, surviving happiness, pride, contentment and product authenticity entered as covariates. The authors' own reason for running Study 4 is the sentence the article block-quotes: the earlier measures, 'while informative, did not involve consequential decisions and did not involve a dollar metric'. SCOPE: this manipulates a two-word production cue, not a narrative, and the article says so. No preregistered replication found in this pass.

Newman, G. E., & Bloom, P. (2014). 'Physical contact influences how much people pay at celebrity auctions.' Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(10), 3705-3708. doi:10.1073/pnas.1313637111. [FULL ABSTRACT AND SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT READ, reconstructed from the Crossref and OpenAlex item records. FULL TEXT NOT READ: pnas.org returned an empty body twice and the PubMed Central copy served a reCAPTCHA challenge, so lot counts, regression coefficients and percentage-above-estimate figures must not be printed, and the article prints none.] Newman first at the Yale School of Management, Bloom last in Yale psychology. Archival analysis of final bids from three high-profile estate auctions plus a follow-up experiment. In the authors' words, expectations about the amount of physical contact between object and celebrity positively predict final bids for items belonging to well-liked individuals, John F. Kennedy their example, and negatively predict bids for items belonging to disliked individuals, Bernard Madoff theirs. Follow-up: participants reported they would pay substantially less for a well-liked celebrity's sweater if it were sterilised first, while sterilisation increased what they would pay for a disliked celebrity's. SCOPE: an object's history can move a real auction price, which is provenance and a contagion-by-touch mechanism rather than narrative, and the archival arm is correlational.

Eustice, C., McCole, D., & Rutty, M. (2019). 'The impact of different product messages on wine tourists' willingness to pay: A non-hypothetical experiment.' Tourism Management, 72, 242-248. doi:10.1016/j.tourman.2018.11.022. [ABSTRACT READ VIA SEARCH RETRIEVAL ONLY; full text not retrieved and sciencedirect.com was NOT read. No figure quoted.] Eustice first, McCole second and corresponding, Rutty last, all in the Department of Community Sustainability at Michigan State University. A Becker, DeGroot and Marschak experimental auction on wine tourists intercepted at cellar doors in an emerging wine region, reported as 143 participants. Award messages produced the highest willingness to pay, local-production messages a modest gain, sensory messages no measurable effect. The closest published thing to an origin story tested on real money at a point of sale, and the origin message loses to a plain quality signal. The article cites the ranking and states that only the abstract was read.

Hiscox, M. J., Broukhim, M., & Litwin, C. (2011). 'Consumer Demand for Fair Trade: New Evidence from a Field Experiment Using eBay Auctions of Fresh Roasted Coffee.' SSRN Electronic Journal. doi:10.2139/ssrn.1811783. [Abstract and summary read; full text not retrieved.] A WORKING PAPER, NOT A PEER-REVIEWED ARTICLE, AND LABELLED AS ONE IN THE ARTICLE. Hiscox first and corresponding at Harvard, Broukhim middle at Stanford, Litwin last at Harvard. Fresh roasted coffee auctioned on eBay with and without a randomised Fair Trade label; reported premium 23 per cent. A certification claim rather than a narrative, and cited here as the design Significant Objects lacked: same platform, same goods, randomised label, real bids.

van Laer, T., de Ruyter, K., Visconti, L. M., & Wetzels, M. (2014). 'The Extended Transportation-Imagery Model: A Meta-Analysis of the Antecedents and Consequences of Consumers' Narrative Transportation.' Journal of Consumer Research, 40(5), 797-817. doi:10.1086/673383. [FULL RESULTS TABLES READ, from the accepted author version in the City, University of London repository. Author order confirmed at Crossref: van Laer first, then de Ruyter, Visconti, Wetzels. CREDIT VAN LAER, NOT GREEN.] 76 published and unpublished papers, 132 effect sizes, across Dutch, English, French, German and Italian. Reliability-adjusted correlations. CONSEQUENCES, the half the article uses: affective response .57 across 13 effect sizes; attitude .44 across 31, with the largest file-drawer figure in the paper; intention .31 across 9 effect sizes and 1,129 people; belief .26; narrative thought .20; CRITICAL THOUGHT MINUS .20 across 7 effect sizes and 2,373 participants, the only negative coefficient; combined .36. MODERATOR THE ARTICLE LEADS WITH BECAUSE IT IS ABOUT MEASUREMENT: studies using Green and Brock's Transportation scale gave .34 across 127 effect sizes and 20,620 participants, studies using another scale gave .56 across five effect sizes and 588 participants, and the difference is significant; the authors note it disappeared once affective-response effect sizes were excluded. The authors' own flag: the effect on critical thoughts is less significant than the effect on the other consequence variables. NO PRICE OR WILLINGNESS-TO-PAY OUTCOME APPEARS ANYWHERE IN THIS META-ANALYSIS.

van Laer, T., Feiereisen, S., & Visconti, L. M. (2019). 'Storytelling in the digital era: A meta-analysis of relevant moderators of the narrative transportation effect.' Journal of Business Research, 96, 135-146. doi:10.1016/j.jbusres.2018.10.053. [ABSTRACT AND INDEXING RECORDS READ VIA SEARCH RETRIEVAL; full text not retrieved. van Laer first and corresponding at Cass Business School, Feiereisen middle at Montpellier Business School, Visconti last.] 64 articles featuring 138 narrative transportation effect sizes. Transportation is stronger when the story is commercial rather than non-commercial, user-generated rather than professionally generated, and received by one story-receiver at a time. CORRECTION THE ARTICLE CARRIES: the '64 articles, 138 effect sizes' figure belongs to this paper and is widely a count this vault had earlier recorded against the wrong source 2016. No pooled effect size was verified and none is quoted.

Braddock, K., & Dillard, J. P. (2016). 'Meta-analytic evidence for the persuasive effect of narratives on beliefs, attitudes, intentions, and behaviors.' Communication Monographs, 83(4), 446-467. doi:10.1080/03637751.2015.1128555. [ABSTRACT READ; full text not retrieved. Braddock first and corresponding, Dillard last, both at Pennsylvania State University.] THE ONLY META-ANALYSIS HERE THAT MEASURES BEHAVIOUR, AND THE NUMBER THE ARTICLE PRINTS IS THE FIVE. Pooled correlations: beliefs across 37 studies and 7,376 people at .17; attitudes across 40 studies and 7,132 people at .19; intentions across 28 studies and 5,211 people at .17; behaviours across 5 studies and 978 people at .23. Neither medium of presentation nor research design moderated the effect; fictionality results were mixed. Not one of the five behaviour studies measured a price. Secondary sources give conflicting overall study counts; the per-outcome values in the abstract are authoritative and are what the article uses.

Rahmani, B., Montano, B., Groves, D. W., & Green, D. P. (2025). 'The persuasive effects of narrative entertainment: a meta-analysis of recent experiments.' Behavioural Public Policy, 1-23. doi:10.1017/bpp.2025.10010. Open access, CC BY-NC. [FULL ABSTRACT READ, reconstructed from the OpenAlex item record; full text not retrieved. Rahmani first at Harvard, Montano and Groves middle, Green last and corresponding at Columbia.] THE QUALIFICATION THAT REORGANISES THE ARTICLE. 377 findings from 77 experiments on narrative radio, television and film, covering entertainment-first and education-first narratives, including work from low-income and middle-income countries. Positive headline: narrative entertainment 'is quite influential, with sizable persuasive effects that remain apparent weeks after initial exposure'. Then the sentence that corrects the spine, verbatim: 'A smaller literature reports head-to-head tests of the relative effectiveness of narrative vs non-narrative messages; although inconclusive, the evidence suggests that narratives may be only slightly more persuasive than non-narrative messages. If true, this finding would imply that the main advantage of narratives may be their ability to attract and engage large and diverse audiences.' The pooled estimate is relayed only in secondary summaries and is not printed. Publication-bias and sensitivity results were NOT read and are not characterised. NOTE: Donald P. Green here is NOT Melanie C. Green of the transportation model, and the article says so.

Green, M. C., & Brock, T. C. (2000). 'The role of transportation in the persuasiveness of public narratives.' Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79(5), 701-721. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.79.5.701. [ABSTRACT READ VIA SEARCH RETRIEVAL of the publisher abstract; psycnet.apa.org was NOT read and the full text was not retrieved.] THE MODEL AND THE SCALE THE WHOLE LITERATURE RESTS ON. Green first, Brock last. Transportation proposed as the mechanism by which narratives affect beliefs, defined as absorption into a story entailing imagery, affect and attentional focus, and this is the paper that developed and validated the transportation scale. Experiment 1 at 97 participants found extent of transportation augmented story-consistent beliefs and favourable evaluations of protagonists; Experiment 2 at 69 participants found highly transported readers noticed fewer false notes than less-transported readers. The 2024 review records that all 95 articles in its sample reference this paper.

Escalas, J. E. (2004). 'Imagine Yourself in the Product: Mental Simulation, Narrative Transportation, and Persuasion.' Journal of Advertising, 33(2), 37-48. doi:10.1080/00913367.2004.10639163. [FULL ABSTRACT READ, reconstructed from the OpenAlex item record; full text not retrieved.] THE CANONICAL ADVERTISING SOURCE FOR THE REDUCED-SCRUTINY CLAIM. SOLE AUTHOR, then at the Eller School, University of Arizona. One experiment on advertisement-encouraged mental simulation, with outcomes being advertisement attitudes and brand evaluations, not behaviour and not spend. Quoted in her own words: 'Transportation includes strong affective responses and low levels of critical thought, which, in turn, affect ad attitudes and brand evaluations.' The 2024 review separately credits Nielsen and Escalas 2010 for HIGH cognitive effort, so the two must not be run together, and notes her manipulation was a small adjustment to copy rather than a full story.

Thomas, V. L., & Grigsby, J. L. (2024). 'Narrative transportation: A systematic literature review and future research agenda.' Psychology & Marketing, 41(8), 1805-1819. doi:10.1002/mar.22011. Open access, CC BY-NC-ND. [FULL TEXT READ, from the Old Dominion University repository copy. WEB APPENDIX S1 WAS NOT READ and holds the databases, search string, date window and inclusion criteria, so none of that is characterised.] Thomas first at Old Dominion, Grigsby last at Missouri State; the repository cover page spells the forename 'Jaime' and the published byline 'Jamie'. 95 peer-reviewed articles under the SPAR-4-SLR protocol. FOUR THINGS THE ARTICLE USES. One, reduced counterarguing arrives alongside high cognitive effort rather than instead of it, which the authors call 'a surprising combination of effects'. Two, of the 60 articles that built transportation into the design it 'was almost exclusively measured', which the review puts at 98 per cent, and treated as a mediator in 66.7 per cent of cases. Three, the outcome asymmetry: 12 articles on attitudes, 11 on behavioural intentions, a single named instance of actual behaviour as choice, and an outcomes table containing NO PRICE, SPEND OR PAYMENT OUTCOME OF ANY KIND. Four, scrutiny can run the other way: story format can activate persuasion knowledge so consumers become sceptical and more critical, Appel 2022 reduced transportation with a manipulative-intent warning, and Tezer and colleagues 2022 found consumers processed analytically when perceived risk was high.

THE ABSENCE CLAIM, SEARCHED BEFORE IT WAS ALLOWED TO STAND. No published, peer-reviewed, randomised test was found in which a narrative was added or withheld and a real transaction price was the dependent variable. Searched by WebSearch in standard and extended modes: controlled experiments adding or withholding a story with price or willingness to pay measured; narrative transportation crossed with incentive-compatible and Becker, DeGroot and Marschak designs; randomised field experiments and online-retail A/B tests on story-style against plain product descriptions with real sales or conversion as the outcome; and provenance, artisanal, handmade, wine, coffee, cocoa and olive-oil origin designs on experimental auctions. What came back instead, and the article names them: Fuchs and colleagues' Study 4 manipulated a two-word production cue; Eustice and colleagues tested message types and the origin message underperformed the award message; Hiscox and colleagues tested a certification label in an unpublished working paper; Newman and Bloom analysed archival prices with no randomised manipulation and a contagion-by-touch mechanism. AN AGENCY REPORT OF PERCEIVED WORTH RISING BY UP TO 74 PER CENT IS COMMERCIAL, UNPUBLISHED AND NOT PEER REVIEWED, AND THE FIGURE IS NOT PRINTED IN ANY FORM. A frequently circulated brand-story study at a total sample of about 20 participants is too small to carry anything and is not cited.

Related concepts

• Persuasion Knowledge

People

• Jonah Berger