Abstract

Narrative interaction plays an important role in shaping people's beliefs and behaviors both online and in the offline world. We present an experiment examining whether a simple intervention of effect prompting---asking participants to list the effects of complex events---impacts the narrative framing of their networked interactions. After reading a text-based narrative about the Fukushima nuclear disaster, participants in a fully connected network interacted with their neighbors and received rewards for submitting hashtags that matched those of their network partners. Half of the groups received an \textit{effect-prompting} intervention, which shifted participants toward producing more effect-oriented hashtags during networked interactions. We found that the effect-prompting instruction influenced the hashtags participants generated during the network interaction. However, the extent of this shift in hashtags depended on how likely the group was to achieve global coherence.We also examined these dynamics with networks of interacting large language model (LLM) agents using Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct. The study highlights how language-based prompting can subtly shift the narrative framing of online communication.

Date

October 22, 2025

Authors

Hunter Priniski, Bryce Linford, Darren Cao, Fred Morstatter, Jeff Brantingham, Hongjing Lu

Journal

Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Volume

47