Summary 2 Health Communication
Week 6 Storytelling
Micro lecture 1: Moye-Gusé
Learning objectives:
- Understand how the Entertainment Overcoming Resistance Model (EORM) works
and how to apply the model to a persuasive health message.
- Know the effects of storytelling and specific characteristics of narratives that
influences these effects.
Moye-Gusé defines entertainment-education as the prosocial messages that are embedded
into popular entertainment media content (Moyer-Gusé, 2008).
“A way of informing the public about a social issue or concern, by incorporating an
educational message into popular entertainment content in order to raise awareness,
increase knowledge, create favorable attitudes, and ultimately motivate people to take
socially responsible action in their own lives (Singhal & Rogers, 1999).”
There are two interventions that have been caried out in The Netherlands:
1. Dance4life is an entertainment-educational intervention to decrease HIV. They make
use of dance and music because it is easily available and to engage in.
2. Sound effects, which was developed to prevent hearing damage at people that go
out to festivals and are exposed to loud music.
Let’s watch some TV… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZmwEgK2AEA&SPfreload=10
- And ask yourself:
o Who is the target group? à Mid 20’s?
§ The target group is adolescents, so youths that still live at home and
probably not sexually active.
o What is the problem? à Unplanned pregnancy.
§ Lack of knowledge about condom effectiveness.
o What is the message’s main goal? à Condom use cannot 100% prevent u of
getting pregnant.
§ Increase knowledge/awareness about condom effectiveness.
o Do you think the message was effective? à No.
§ Actually, it was effective:
1. Between 50-60% of viewers recalled that condoms do not
always prevents pregnancy.
2. 10% of viewers talked with an adult about condom
effectiveness.
1
,Entertainment-education short history
Founder: Miguel Sabido
Pioneer project: Simplemente Maria (1969)
- A cinderella story about a young woman immigrating from the Andes to take a job in
Lima.
- Not designed to impact human behavior.
- Immense popularity.
Each of Sabido’s soap operas contained:
It is important to use different kind of role models:
1. Characters who support the central values (positive role models).
2. Characters who reject those values (negative role models).
3. Characters who waiver in between (doubters/transitional role models).
o Doubters represent different socio-demographic categories of audience and
different stages along a continuum of behavior change.
o Gradually, each doubter shifts toward the new values and begins to adopt
the corresponding socially desirable behavior.
o Each episode is reinforced (being told again) by a 30-40 second epilogue
(delivering the educational message again), an advertisement for that day’s
educational message delivered by a national celebrity. à it enhances the
effectiveness!
Basic theories of entertainment-education (E-E) integrated in EORM
- Social learning/social cognitive theory by Bandura (1986).
o Direct learning: reinforce positive behavior, ‘punish negative behavior.’
o Indirect learning through role models.
o Imitate observed behavior.
o But… be aware of identification with the wrong role model à Archie Bunker
effect.
This is a very simple sketch of the social cognitive theory. One of the main things that is
interesting is in this theory, is the concept of reciprocal determinism (wederkerigheid).
Which means that all the variables in the model (environmental factors, personal factors,
and behavior) can influence each other. This model differentiates itself from the integrative
model because this is not a linear model.
2
,If you take a look at these specific factors, you see that outcome expectancies and self-
efficacy are the most important variables that motivate people to behave in a certain way.
These personal factors are also part of Moye-Gusé model, she doesn’t go to the other part
of the model.
- Extended-elaboration likelihood model (EELM) by Slater and Rouner (2002).
Do not confuse this model with the ELM because it is a different type of model. The variable
‘issue-involvement’ is not here because in entertainment-education it is not about issue-
involvement. You do not want people to be aware of the educational content. This issue-
involvement is replaced by two other concepts: absorption (in other words, engagement
with narrative transportation) and identification with characters.
Absorption is being determined by four predictors. These factors determine to what extent
people feel absorbed in a storyline.
1. Story line appeal: romantic, action, historical, etc.
2. Quality of production: writing, filming, etc.
3. Unobtrusiveness of persuasive subtext.
4. Homophily: similarity of characters and self.
The second variable replaced issue-involvement is identification with characters.
Identification with characters is about taking the perspective of the characters you are being
watching. This is being predicted by absorption and homophily. Both absorption and
identification with characters lead to net polarity of responses regarding imbedded
persuasive content (certain beliefs about the presented content). These beliefs then
influence attitudes and behaviors. In addition, as you can see there is a variable called:
rehearsal/reinforcement (peer discussion, epilogues). As already being discussed at
elements of Sabido’s soap operas, they take the epilogue as a moderator between beliefs
and attitudes/behavioral effects.
3
, Transportation and identification
1. Transportation: “a convergent process, where all mental systems and capacities
become focused on events in the story (Green & Brock, 2000).”
2. Identification is a complex, multidimensional construct:
o Similarity towards a character is not the same as liking the character. So, you
can feel similar as a character (homophily) but not likes this character.
Identification is the cognitive and emotional process of taking the perspective
of others. Similarity can act as a predictor but is not part of the identification.
o For persuasive effects, emotional involvement with/responses to characters
may be more important than similarity (Slater & Rouner, 2002)/
o But…mind the possible empathetic distress/negative emotional
responses!!(e.g., Murphy et al., 2013).
o Both processes reduce counterarguing!
Both transportation and identification lead to a reduction of counterarguing. This is a very
important factor in the elaboration likelihood model. So, counterarguing is coming up with
arguments against the persuasive message. Because you are being swept up in the story and
all your mental capacities are being directed to that story, you do not have any mental room
left for counterarguing. The same with identification, if you take the perspective of the
character and you lose your sense of the self, then you will have a limited mental room for
counterarguing which leads to positive persuasive outcomes.
Entertainment Overcoming Resistance Model
Going to the Entertainment Overcoming Resistance Model (EORM) of Moyer-Gusé (2008),
you can see that these theories (social cognitive theory and EELM) integrated in the EORM.
The EORM consists of several entertainment features (such as, parasocial interaction,
narrative structure, identification, etc.) that have an impact on resistance (having a reaction
against the perceived social pressure to change). The entertainment features influence
story-consistent attitudes and behaviors by impacting resistance.
4
Week 6 Storytelling
Micro lecture 1: Moye-Gusé
Learning objectives:
- Understand how the Entertainment Overcoming Resistance Model (EORM) works
and how to apply the model to a persuasive health message.
- Know the effects of storytelling and specific characteristics of narratives that
influences these effects.
Moye-Gusé defines entertainment-education as the prosocial messages that are embedded
into popular entertainment media content (Moyer-Gusé, 2008).
“A way of informing the public about a social issue or concern, by incorporating an
educational message into popular entertainment content in order to raise awareness,
increase knowledge, create favorable attitudes, and ultimately motivate people to take
socially responsible action in their own lives (Singhal & Rogers, 1999).”
There are two interventions that have been caried out in The Netherlands:
1. Dance4life is an entertainment-educational intervention to decrease HIV. They make
use of dance and music because it is easily available and to engage in.
2. Sound effects, which was developed to prevent hearing damage at people that go
out to festivals and are exposed to loud music.
Let’s watch some TV… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZmwEgK2AEA&SPfreload=10
- And ask yourself:
o Who is the target group? à Mid 20’s?
§ The target group is adolescents, so youths that still live at home and
probably not sexually active.
o What is the problem? à Unplanned pregnancy.
§ Lack of knowledge about condom effectiveness.
o What is the message’s main goal? à Condom use cannot 100% prevent u of
getting pregnant.
§ Increase knowledge/awareness about condom effectiveness.
o Do you think the message was effective? à No.
§ Actually, it was effective:
1. Between 50-60% of viewers recalled that condoms do not
always prevents pregnancy.
2. 10% of viewers talked with an adult about condom
effectiveness.
1
,Entertainment-education short history
Founder: Miguel Sabido
Pioneer project: Simplemente Maria (1969)
- A cinderella story about a young woman immigrating from the Andes to take a job in
Lima.
- Not designed to impact human behavior.
- Immense popularity.
Each of Sabido’s soap operas contained:
It is important to use different kind of role models:
1. Characters who support the central values (positive role models).
2. Characters who reject those values (negative role models).
3. Characters who waiver in between (doubters/transitional role models).
o Doubters represent different socio-demographic categories of audience and
different stages along a continuum of behavior change.
o Gradually, each doubter shifts toward the new values and begins to adopt
the corresponding socially desirable behavior.
o Each episode is reinforced (being told again) by a 30-40 second epilogue
(delivering the educational message again), an advertisement for that day’s
educational message delivered by a national celebrity. à it enhances the
effectiveness!
Basic theories of entertainment-education (E-E) integrated in EORM
- Social learning/social cognitive theory by Bandura (1986).
o Direct learning: reinforce positive behavior, ‘punish negative behavior.’
o Indirect learning through role models.
o Imitate observed behavior.
o But… be aware of identification with the wrong role model à Archie Bunker
effect.
This is a very simple sketch of the social cognitive theory. One of the main things that is
interesting is in this theory, is the concept of reciprocal determinism (wederkerigheid).
Which means that all the variables in the model (environmental factors, personal factors,
and behavior) can influence each other. This model differentiates itself from the integrative
model because this is not a linear model.
2
,If you take a look at these specific factors, you see that outcome expectancies and self-
efficacy are the most important variables that motivate people to behave in a certain way.
These personal factors are also part of Moye-Gusé model, she doesn’t go to the other part
of the model.
- Extended-elaboration likelihood model (EELM) by Slater and Rouner (2002).
Do not confuse this model with the ELM because it is a different type of model. The variable
‘issue-involvement’ is not here because in entertainment-education it is not about issue-
involvement. You do not want people to be aware of the educational content. This issue-
involvement is replaced by two other concepts: absorption (in other words, engagement
with narrative transportation) and identification with characters.
Absorption is being determined by four predictors. These factors determine to what extent
people feel absorbed in a storyline.
1. Story line appeal: romantic, action, historical, etc.
2. Quality of production: writing, filming, etc.
3. Unobtrusiveness of persuasive subtext.
4. Homophily: similarity of characters and self.
The second variable replaced issue-involvement is identification with characters.
Identification with characters is about taking the perspective of the characters you are being
watching. This is being predicted by absorption and homophily. Both absorption and
identification with characters lead to net polarity of responses regarding imbedded
persuasive content (certain beliefs about the presented content). These beliefs then
influence attitudes and behaviors. In addition, as you can see there is a variable called:
rehearsal/reinforcement (peer discussion, epilogues). As already being discussed at
elements of Sabido’s soap operas, they take the epilogue as a moderator between beliefs
and attitudes/behavioral effects.
3
, Transportation and identification
1. Transportation: “a convergent process, where all mental systems and capacities
become focused on events in the story (Green & Brock, 2000).”
2. Identification is a complex, multidimensional construct:
o Similarity towards a character is not the same as liking the character. So, you
can feel similar as a character (homophily) but not likes this character.
Identification is the cognitive and emotional process of taking the perspective
of others. Similarity can act as a predictor but is not part of the identification.
o For persuasive effects, emotional involvement with/responses to characters
may be more important than similarity (Slater & Rouner, 2002)/
o But…mind the possible empathetic distress/negative emotional
responses!!(e.g., Murphy et al., 2013).
o Both processes reduce counterarguing!
Both transportation and identification lead to a reduction of counterarguing. This is a very
important factor in the elaboration likelihood model. So, counterarguing is coming up with
arguments against the persuasive message. Because you are being swept up in the story and
all your mental capacities are being directed to that story, you do not have any mental room
left for counterarguing. The same with identification, if you take the perspective of the
character and you lose your sense of the self, then you will have a limited mental room for
counterarguing which leads to positive persuasive outcomes.
Entertainment Overcoming Resistance Model
Going to the Entertainment Overcoming Resistance Model (EORM) of Moyer-Gusé (2008),
you can see that these theories (social cognitive theory and EELM) integrated in the EORM.
The EORM consists of several entertainment features (such as, parasocial interaction,
narrative structure, identification, etc.) that have an impact on resistance (having a reaction
against the perceived social pressure to change). The entertainment features influence
story-consistent attitudes and behaviors by impacting resistance.
4
