Social Connection and Fiction: The Possible Benefit of "Interacting" with Fictional Characters

This study addresses one role that fiction may play in people’s lives – specifically, providing social “interaction.” Participants (265 University of Oregon students) completed a writing task that involved writing about fictional characters and completed measures of social fulfillment to see if that interaction may fulfill social needs and alleviate loneliness. We hypothesized that higher transportation scores – the immersion produced by the story as judged by an outside reader’s perspective – would predict lower participant loneliness scores for participants who are writing from the perspective of a fictional character, to a fictional character, or their own journal entry. Furthermore, we hypothesized that the media source of the fictional character chosen by the writer will moderate this relationship, with written source media producing higher transportation scores and lower loneliness scores than visual source media. Finally, we hypothesized that participants who wrote more fiction or journaled outside of the context of the study would write passages that earned higher transportation scores and also report lower loneliness scores. Results indicated that coder-rated transportation does not significantly predict a larger reduction in loneliness scores. Neither media type nor participants’ own writing outside of the study moderated the relationship between transportation and change in loneliness. Results may have implications for developing a writing intervention to alleviate loneliness