Charting the Empirical Terrain of Narrative Persuasion: Insights From Meta-Analyses

Over the past two decades, narrative persuasion—the art of influencing others through storytelling—has emerged as a dynamic area of research, characterized by a growth in empirical studies and a recent increase in meta-analyses. This paper treats meta-analyses as a dual-layered repository of empirical evidence, providing both aggregate-level insights and curated data from primary studies. We examine 17 meta-analyses on narrative persuasion published between 1997 and 2023, presenting a two-part review and analysis. First, we summarize the meta-analyses at the aggregate level to outline the field's contours, map central questions, and identify key patterns in the findings. Second, we delve into the individual effect sizes reported in these studies, focusing on the empirical distributions of effects and the statistical power of the primary studies. Finally, we discuss the implications for future research in narrative persuasion.