Abstract
Some research literature have suggested that stories can influence the self-concept. We want to test whether a narrative does influence people’s notions of self in their memory or imagination. Our hypothesis is that being exposed to a story makes one reconstructs one’s self in one’s memory or imagination to be more aligned with the story’s main character. With an experiment, we exposed participants (n=129) to two conditions (control: report of facts; treatment: the facts in a story form), and then asked the Likert-scale questions to see whether they report selves in their memory or imagination that resemble the story’s main character. Using independent sample t-tests, we found no statistically significant results. Therefore, we failed to reject our Null hypothesis — there was not enough evidence to reject it.
Keywords: story, narrative, self-concept, mental time travel, memory reconstruction