Identity Disclosure Timing Effects in Narratives Related to Transgender Individuals

When striving to promote acceptance of marginalized groups through persuasive narratives, past research suggests that delaying disclosure of a character’s stigmatized identity can facilitate narrative involvement and promote message-consistent outcomes. In the present studies, we apply this strategy to the context of transgender individuals through two experiments that compared narratives which disclosed the protagonist’s identity at different points in the story (early or late). In findings that diverge from previous evidence, our results offer a complicated picture of narrative influence. In Study 1 (N = 334; story of transgender boy), early disclosure, rather than late, promoted greater identification and transportation and lower counterarguing. These variables mediated the relationship between disclosure timing and message-consistent outcomes such that participants in the early disclosure condition reported more favorable attitudes toward transgender individuals as well as greater interest in discussion and willingness to communicate with them. In Study 2 (N = 328; story of transgender girl), we found that the outcome variables were only significantly associated with political ideology. Both studies collected data from a politically diverse sample of U.S. adults.