Summary
Narrative transportation is the experience of being carried away by a story: attention, imagery and feeling all absorbed in the world of the narrative, so that for a while the reader or viewer is less present in their own. The travel metaphor comes from Richard Gerrig’s work in cognitive psychology (1993). Melanie Green and Timothy Brock built a scale to measure it in 2000.
It works by a different route from argument: a transported audience is inside the story, not weighing it up, which can lower resistance to persuasion. Green and Markus Appel put it carefully: people “are changed, at least temporarily, by their experience in that narrative world”.
Rationale
It accounts for how a told story can move someone, for a while. The catch is in “at least temporarily”: dispositions are “continually shaped and reinforced” by everything else in a life.