StoryNet Workshop

“Narrative effects on the individual and the social”

June 27 and 28, 2014

Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and Psychology, Budapest, Hungary          

Stories have a proven effect on matters pertinent to the individual: readers or viewers personal attitudes and beliefs about real-world matters, and their understanding of themselves and the others. Individual-level phenomena have been measured in order to understand these effects: narrative engagement or transportation, enjoyment, and other cognitive and emotional variables that were found to act as mediators for acquiring knowledge and changing attitudes.

But narratives have also important social implications; for example, they facilitate empathy with others, or provide opportunities to experience distant social situations. This workshop will have a special focus on the effects and functions of narratives in the social sphere, specifically regarding a reader’s or viewer’s social identity. Narratives often shape what individuals think about the social group to which they belong, particularly when fictional or non-fictional stories describe events that make up the history of a group. For instance, there are several so called "joint history textbook projects" through which neighboring nations try to shape the social identity of involved nations with the hope of having more peaceful intergroup relations. Also fictional narratives, such as Timur Vermes’s work on Hitler, might make salient the group identity of readers and shape it according to the novel’s content.

We invite contributions that address issues of social identity, as well as other social and individual-level effects of narratives. For instance, how do group history narratives shape the social identity of readers? And how do social identity effects of a narrative add to other narrative effects? Could narratives represent historical events without distortion? Contributions dealing with a wide spectrum of fictional and non-fictional media stories including textual, audiovisual, interactive and cross-media storytelling are welcome.

Links to Program and Travel guide

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