For Whom the Tale’s Told: Towards a Multidimensional Model of Targeted Narrative Persuasion in Information Operations

Abstract

The modern information environment provides an opportunity for cognitive engineering to inform the study of information operations, which involve strategic, often politically-motivated actions to manipulate a targeted audience. In this paper we integrate interdisciplinary theoretical concepts to provide a foundation for a model of persuasion in information operations. We identify sensemaking and framing as key processes and connect these to narrative and identity theories to illustrate how they can inform the study of the individual and the collective in modern sociotechnical systems. From this, we propose a model of narrative persuasion to guide research on social media information operations. Through this, we offer a set of research guidelines to demonstrate how this can serve as a foundation for empirical work blending quantitative and qualitative methods. In this way, we show how cognitive and computational sciences can be blended in support of fundamental and applied research in information operations.