2 Transportation

You may have experienced times when you became fully immersed in, or swept along by, a story. You may have had the experience of reading a book, and almost feeling like you were actually in the story world described in the book, to the extent that things going on in the room around you faded completely into the background. This sense of immersion is referred to by psychologists as ‘transportation’, where the reader is (mentally) transported into the world of the story. Conversely, you might have had the experience of wanting to read a book, but feeling that you ‘just can’t get into it’ and rather than feeling immersed in the story you have to consciously force yourself to keep reading. That feeling would be referred to as a lack of transportation.

One definition of transportation is ‘the state of feeling cognitively, emotionally and imaginatively immersed in a narrative world’ (Sestir and Green, 2010, p. 274). Research has found that the extent to which the individual is transported into the story world has important impacts psychologically. For example, the extent to which people feel like they are ‘in’ the story affects the degree of empathy readers feel for the characters (e.g. Bal and Veltkamp, 2013; Walkington, Ashton Wigman and Bowles, 2020). The degree to which a reader is transported can even affect pro-social behaviour towards others. For example, Johnson (2012) found that readers who were transported into a story world during an experiment were more likely to subsequently help a researcher who dropped their pens on the floor. It has also been found to be an important determinant in health-related behaviours. Bannerjee and Green (2013) found that transportation into stories about the negative effects of alcohol use led to negative expectancies about alcohol use, and suggested this might be because information which is presented in a story form is accepted more readily than facts and figures.

Next you will read about how crime writers feel they draw readers into their narrative worlds. Of course, to crime writers the term ‘transportation’ in and of itself, and particularly its psychological consequences, might not be something they necessarily recognise given the subject matter they write about. However, all authors want to achieve transportation, in as much as they want to draw readers in to their books and the stories they tell.