The Effects of Narrative vs. Expository Messages on Social Support-Seeking in First-Year College Students

Abstract

College students often experience high levels of loneliness and isolation, with first-year students being particularly vulnerable due to environmental and social changes. People often hesitate to reach out for support in part due to a systematic underestimation of how positively others will respond to their social outreach. Our study aims to assess the feasibility of reading about peers’ experiences as an intervention for improving the perceptions of peers’ empathy and social support-seeking behaviors among first-year college students. Across two preregistered studies (Study 1: N=118; Study 2: N=85), we tested whether reading peers’ challenges presented in either narrative (based on a first-person narrator and emotional language) or expository (statistics and factual language) format could lead to changes in empathy perception and support-seeking behaviors. Based on prior studies showing positive effects of fiction-reading on social cognition, we hypothesized that reading narratives about other students’ struggles will increase support-seeking behaviors. On the other hand, given the potential destigmatizing effect of normative statistics, we hypothesized that reading about statistics of students’ struggles will increase students’ perception of how empathic their peers are. Findings from Study 1 indicated that reading about student experiences in both styles did not consistently change empathy perception, but significantly increased social support-seeking. These results were partially replicated in Study 2. Given that social support is strongly associated with many mental health outcomes, this suggests that such an intervention design can be potentially beneficial and effective in promoting support-seeking in students. This in turn can increase social outreach, connection-making, and belongingness and wellbeing.