IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/jbrese/v170y2024ics0148296323006483.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Sensational stories: The role of narrative characteristics in distinguishing real and fake news and predicting their spread

Author

Listed:
  • Hamby, Anne
  • Kim, Hongmin
  • Spezzano, Francesca

Abstract

Media content – whether real or fake – is often presented in a story format. While research has examined some of the linguistic differences between real and fake news articles, less attention has been given to the ways in which they vary in terms of their narrativity. The current work leverages text analysis to build on recent work in the consumer field examining narrativity in predicting messages’ persuasiveness. We conduct three studies in the context of real and fake news to examine how they differ in terms of their narrative content and discourse features. We further examine how variation in narrativity predicts the likelihood that the article is shared on social media, an outcome of importance to marketers and persuasion agents.

Suggested Citation

  • Hamby, Anne & Kim, Hongmin & Spezzano, Francesca, 2024. "Sensational stories: The role of narrative characteristics in distinguishing real and fake news and predicting their spread," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 170(C).
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:jbrese:v:170:y:2024:i:c:s0148296323006483
    DOI: 10.1016/j.jbusres.2023.114289
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0148296323006483
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.jbusres.2023.114289?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Ana Babić Rosario & Kristine Valck & Francesca Sotgiu, 2020. "Conceptualizing the electronic word-of-mouth process: What we know and need to know about eWOM creation, exposure, and evaluation," Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Springer, vol. 48(3), pages 422-448, May.
    2. Zaman, Mustafeed & Vo-Thanh, Tan & Nguyen, Chi T.K. & Hasan, Rajibul & Akter, Shahriar & Mariani, Marcello & Hikkerova, Lubica, 2023. "Motives for posting fake reviews: Evidence from a cross-cultural comparison," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 154(C).
    3. Gupta, Ashish & Li, Han & Farnoush, Alireza & Jiang, Wenting, 2022. "Understanding patterns of COVID infodemic: A systematic and pragmatic approach to curb fake news," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 140(C), pages 670-683.
    4. Jennifer Edson Escalas, 2007. "Self-Referencing and Persuasion: Narrative Transportation versus Analytical Elaboration," Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Consumer Research Inc., vol. 33(4), pages 421-429, December.
    5. Sarah G. Moore & Brent McFerran, 2017. "She Said, She Said: Differential Interpersonal Similarities Predict Unique Linguistic Mimicry in Online Word of Mouth," Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, University of Chicago Press, vol. 2(2), pages 229-245.
    6. Tom van Laer & Ko de Ruyter & Luca M. Visconti & Martin Wetzels, 2014. "The Extended Transportation-Imagery Model: A Meta-Analysis of the Antecedents and Consequences of Consumers' Narrative Transportation," Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Consumer Research Inc., vol. 40(5), pages 797-817.
    7. Aleti, Torgeir & Pallant, Jason I. & Tuan, Annamaria & van Laer, Tom, 2019. "Tweeting with the Stars: Automated Text Analysis of the Effect of Celebrity Social Media Communications on Consumer Word of Mouth," Journal of Interactive Marketing, Elsevier, vol. 48(C), pages 17-32.
    8. Visentin, Marco & Pizzi, Gabriele & Pichierri, Marco, 2019. "Fake News, Real Problems for Brands: The Impact of Content Truthfulness and Source Credibility on consumers' Behavioral Intentions toward the Advertised Brands," Journal of Interactive Marketing, Elsevier, vol. 45(C), pages 99-112.
    9. Ratner, Rebecca K & Kahn, Barbara E & Kahneman, Daniel, 1999. "Choosing Less-Preferred Experiences for the Sake of Variety," Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Consumer Research Inc., vol. 26(1), pages 1-15, June.
    10. Neeru Paharia & Anat Keinan & Jill Avery & Juliet B. Schor, 2011. "The Underdog Effect: The Marketing of Disadvantage and Determination through Brand Biography," Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Consumer Research Inc., vol. 37(5), pages 775-790.
    11. Domenico, Giandomenico Di & Sit, Jason & Ishizaka, Alessio & Nunan, Daniel, 2021. "Fake news, social media and marketing: A systematic review," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 124(C), pages 329-341.
    12. Sanghee Oh & Sue Yeon Syn, 2015. "Motivations for sharing information and social support in social media: A comparative analysis of Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, YouTube, and Flickr," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 66(10), pages 2045-2060, October.
    13. Jonah Berger & Yoon Duk Kim & Robert Meyer & J. Jeffrey Inman & Andrew T Stephen, 2021. "What Makes Content Engaging? How Emotional Dynamics Shape Success," Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Consumer Research Inc., vol. 48(2), pages 235-250.
    14. Pezzuti, Todd & Leonhardt, James M. & Warren, Caleb, 2021. "Certainty in Language Increases Consumer Engagement on Social Media," Journal of Interactive Marketing, Elsevier, vol. 53(C), pages 32-46.
    15. Tom van Laer & Jennifer Edson Escalas & Stephan Ludwig & Ellis A van den Hende & Gita V Johar & J Jeffrey Inman & Paul M Herr, 2019. "What Happens in Vegas Stays on TripAdvisor? A Theory and Technique to Understand Narrativity in Consumer Reviews," Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Consumer Research Inc., vol. 46(2), pages 267-285.
    16. Vivek K. Singh & Isha Ghosh & Darshan Sonagara, 2021. "Detecting fake news stories via multimodal analysis," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 72(1), pages 3-17, January.
    17. Quesenberry, Keith A. & Coolsen, Michael K., 2019. "Drama Goes Viral: Effects of Story Development on Shares and Views of Online Advertising Videos," Journal of Interactive Marketing, Elsevier, vol. 48(C), pages 1-16.
    18. Centeno, Dave & Wang, Jeff Jianfeng, 2017. "Celebrities as human brands: An inquiry on stakeholder-actor co-creation of brand identities," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 74(C), pages 133-138.
    19. Moradi, Masoud & Badrinarayanan, Vishag, 2021. "The effects of brand prominence and narrative features on crowdfunding success for entrepreneurial aftermarket enterprises," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 124(C), pages 286-298.
    20. Jordan Etkin & Cassie Mogilner, 2016. "Does Variety Among Activities Increase Happiness?," Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Consumer Research Inc., vol. 43(2), pages 210-229.
    21. Jalali, Nima Y. & Papatla, Purushottam, 2019. "Composing tweets to increase retweets," International Journal of Research in Marketing, Elsevier, vol. 36(4), pages 647-668.
    22. Tom Buchanan, 2020. "Why do people spread false information online? The effects of message and viewer characteristics on self-reported likelihood of sharing social media disinformation," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 15(10), pages 1-33, October.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Giandomenico Domenico & Annamaria Tuan & Marco Visentin, 2021. "Linguistic drivers of misinformation diffusion on social media during the COVID-19 pandemic," Italian Journal of Marketing, Springer, vol. 2021(4), pages 351-369, December.
    2. Cao, Xinyue & Qu, Zhirui & Liu, Yan & Hu, JiaJing, 2021. "How the destination short video affects the customers' attitude: The role of narrative transportation," Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, Elsevier, vol. 62(C).
    3. Aleti, Torgeir & Pallant, Jason I. & Tuan, Annamaria & van Laer, Tom, 2019. "Tweeting with the Stars: Automated Text Analysis of the Effect of Celebrity Social Media Communications on Consumer Word of Mouth," Journal of Interactive Marketing, Elsevier, vol. 48(C), pages 17-32.
    4. Bertele, Kerrie & Feiereisen, Stephanie & Storey, Chris & van Laer, Tom, 2020. "It’s not what you say, it’s the way you say it! Effective message styles for promoting innovative new services," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 107(C), pages 38-49.
    5. Hu, Han-fen & Krishen, Anjala S. & Barnes, Jesse, 2023. "Through narratives we learn: Exploring knowledge-building as a marketing strategy for prosocial water reuse," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 158(C).
    6. Thanh-Thao Nguyen & Bianca Grohmann, 0. "The influence of passion/determination and external disadvantage on consumer responses to brand biographies," Journal of Brand Management, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 0, pages 1-14.
    7. Thanh-Thao Nguyen & Bianca Grohmann, 2020. "The influence of passion/determination and external disadvantage on consumer responses to brand biographies," Journal of Brand Management, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 27(4), pages 452-465, July.
    8. Ali Tezer & H. Onur Bodur & Bianca Grohmann, 2020. "Communicating brand biographies effectively: the role of communication source," Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Springer, vol. 48(4), pages 712-733, July.
    9. Dessart, Laurence & Pitardi, Valentina, 2019. "How stories generate consumer engagement: An exploratory study," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 104(C), pages 183-195.
    10. Hamby, Anne & Orazi, Davide & Moreau, Patrick, 2024. "Whose story is this? Source reveal as a communication tactic to increase consumers’ advocacy for social causes," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 170(C).
    11. Boukis, Achilleas, 2023. "Storytelling in initial coin offerings: Attracting investment or gaining referrals?," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 160(C).
    12. van Laer, Tom & Feiereisen, Stephanie & Visconti, Luca M., 2019. "Storytelling in the digital era: A meta-analysis of relevant moderators of the narrative transportation effect," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 96(C), pages 135-146.
    13. Abdullah Marish Ali & Fuad A. Ghaleb & Mohammed Sultan Mohammed & Fawaz Jaber Alsolami & Asif Irshad Khan, 2023. "Web-Informed-Augmented Fake News Detection Model Using Stacked Layers of Convolutional Neural Network and Deep Autoencoder," Mathematics, MDPI, vol. 11(9), pages 1-21, April.
    14. Appel, Markus, 2022. "Affective resistance to narrative persuasion," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 149(C), pages 850-859.
    15. Jonah Berger & Grant Packard & Reihane Boghrati & Ming Hsu & Ashlee Humphreys & Andrea Luangrath & Sarah Moore & Gideon Nave & Christopher Olivola & Matthew Rocklage, 2022. "Marketing insights from text analysis," Marketing Letters, Springer, vol. 33(3), pages 365-377, September.
    16. Hofacker, Charles F. & de Ruyter, Ko & Lurie, Nicholas H. & Manchanda, Puneet & Donaldson, Jeff, 2016. "Gamification and Mobile Marketing Effectiveness," Journal of Interactive Marketing, Elsevier, vol. 34(C), pages 25-36.
    17. Brianna JeeWon Paulich & V. Kumar, 2021. "Relating entertainment features in screenplays to movie performance: an empirical investigation," Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Springer, vol. 49(6), pages 1222-1242, November.
    18. Antonetti, Paolo & Baines, Paul & Jain, Shailendra, 2018. "The persuasiveness of guilt appeals over time: Pathways to delayed compliance," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 90(C), pages 14-25.
    19. Wang, Fei & Xu, Haifeng & Hou, Ronglin & Zhu, Zhen, 2023. "Designing marketing content for social commerce to drive consumer purchase behaviors: A perspective from speech act theory," Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, Elsevier, vol. 70(C).
    20. Razzaq, Ali & Shao, Wei & Quach, Sara, 2024. "Meme marketing effectiveness: A moderated-mediation model," Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, Elsevier, vol. 78(C).

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:jbrese:v:170:y:2024:i:c:s0148296323006483. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/jbusres .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.