Exploring narrative influence upon environmental perceptions

Successful management of the environment requires more than objective science; it also requires successful management of the subjective perceptions about the environment. This dissertation investigates the influence that entertainment narratives in the mass media have in the formation of environmental perceptions. The field of narrative persuasion has found that individuals often believe information from fictional narratives. However, this dissertation claims that the current homogeneous conceptualization of narrative used in narrative persuasion limits the utility of their results.;Integrating a heterogeneous conceptualization of narrative from the field of discourse psychology with the persuasive focus of narrative persuasion, the model of narrative cartography predicting different levels of persuasion within a single narrative was constructed and tested with two experiments. The first experiment rotated neutral environmental assertions between internal locations of a narrative and found that assertions placed on causal peaks were perceived as more truthful than the same assertions placed in non-causal valleys.;The second experiment examined the strength of this relationship by incorporating anti-environmental assertions and testing the interaction of information placement with strength of pre-existing pro-environmental worldviews. While the perceived truthfulness of the anti-environmental assertions decreased as the strength of pre-existing pro-environmental worldview increased, there was no moderating effect of the difference between peaks and valleys. These results suggest that there is a strong effect of information placement within a narrative upon the formation of environmental perceptions, and that this relationship appears robust even in the face of pre-existing, contradictory belief structures.