3.5 Transportation and empathy
Research suggests that there is a relationship between transportation into story worlds and empathy. Bal and Veltkamp (2013) found that participants who were highly transported were found to be more empathic than their less transported colleagues, and Johnson (2012) found participants who were more transported were more likely to help the experimenter in a study if they had been transported. While some research has not found the same sort of relationship between transportation and empathy (e.g. Koopamn, 2015), a recent meta-analysis by Van Laer, De Ruyter, Visconti and Wetzels (2013) found transportation had a large effect on affective responses. In the latter meta-analysis, it was also found that when individuals were highly transported they engaged in fewer critical thoughts about the material they read. This suggests that when the reader is transported into a story world, they are less likely to counter-argue the information they are presented with, and more likely to accept it uncritically. This greater acceptance of story messages when highly transported into a story world is one of the reasons that psychologists believe that story can be so persuasive.