Are We Live?

Narratives are a prevalent and persuasive form of communication, which are often communicated in real-time (live) or pre-recorded format. Surprisingly, few studies have examined whether pre- recorded as opposed to live settings (i.e., temporal distance) has a significant influential impact on the persuasiveness of the message. The current work examines the effect of temporal distance as well as whether it contains more or less emotional information (i.e., emotional distance) on an audience’s beliefs about story content. We find that live stories are more persuasive, but only when the narrative content is more emotional.