Making sense of life stories: the role of narrative perspective in perceiving hidden information about social identity

Abstract

Does the narrative perspective people adopt when describing important life events convey any hidden information to audiences about their social identities? In this experiment, participants (who were either professional psychotherapists, or laypersons) formed impressions about, and judged the identities of narrators who described important identity-related life events (being Jewish, being gay, being infertile) from one of three different narrative perspectives (retrospective, experiencing and re-experiencing). Results showed that narrative perspective had a highly significant influence on impression formation and identity judgments even when the same events were described. Narrators using the retrospective perspective were generally judged to be better adjusted, more socially desirable and less anxious and dynamic than were narrators describing the same events from the experiencing or re-experiencing perspectives. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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