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The role of viewers’ performance of a narrative on their beliefs about transgender persons

ABSTRACT Transgender community suffers from an extremely negative public perception. Can popular media images change people’s views about transgender persons? This study investigates the role viewers’ active participation and emotional reactions (termed as narrative performance) play in influencing their beliefs and attitudes about the transgender community. Narrative performance, a process by which readers bring cognitions and emotions to engage with a text, is an unexplored construct in narrative persuasion literature. This study advances narrative persuasion literature by examining how people’s performance of a transgender-themed TV drama, Transparent, affects their beliefs and attitudes about transgender persons. Participants (n = 118) watched a popular TV drama and responded to a questionnaire. Principal factor analysis using varimax rotation was conducted to determine the construct validity of narrative performance, and it demonstrated that narrative performance is distinct from related constructs of narrative transportation and identification with story characters. One dimension of performance – Affective and Outcome Preference Performance – emerged as the strongest predictor of viewers’ beliefs about transgender persons. The implications of this research are discussed.