Cinematic narrative transportation and prosocial tendencies in college students: a moderated mediation model

Chinese college students who reported stronger absorption in a feature film also reported stronger prosocial tendencies, with a cross-sectional study identifying character identification as a modest partial pathway between the two. The analysis of 1,054 undergraduates found that the association between cinematic narrative transportation and prosocial tendencies was statistically detectable but small through the proposed mechanism, with character identification accounting for 2.72% of the total association. Moral identity changed the strength of this pathway: identification with the film’s protagonist was associated with prosocial tendencies among students with moderate or high moral identity, but not among those at the low end of the measured range. Because every participant viewed the same film and no comparison group was included, the findings establish an association rather than showing that cinema causes more prosocial behavior.

The classroom study involved a screening of Dying to Survive, a Chinese film directed by Wen Muye and starring Xu Zheng. Adapted from the true story of Lu Yong, a patient with chronic myeloid leukemia, the film follows Cheng Yong, the owner of an Indian “magic oil” shop who smuggles inexpensive generic drugs from India for people with leukemia. Its narrative examines the relationship among medicine, social conditions, commerce and human morality, while Cheng Yong’s movement from commercial self-interest toward helping patients gives viewers a character whose motives and actions are morally complicated. Researchers selected the feature partly because this transformation could support the study’s interest in moral identity without relying on a single, uncomplicated moral perspective. Participants were 421 men and 633 women aged 18 to 23, with a mean age of 20.64 years and a standard deviation of 1.62. They were enrolled at Chengdu College of Arts and Sciences, had normal or corrected-to-normal vision without color deficiency, and had no background in psychology. All received written informed consent.

After the screening, participants completed four self-report instruments during the same class session. Narrative engagement was measured with a 12-item, seven-point scale covering narrative understanding, attentional focus, emotional engagement and narrative presence, with scores from 1 for strongly disagree to 7 for strongly agree. Its internal consistency in this sample was Cronbach’s alpha of 0.76, while the dimension-specific coefficients ranged from 0.74 to 0.94. Character identification was assessed with 11 items on a five-point scale, producing an alpha of 0.70. Moral identity was measured across 11 five-point items addressing the internalization and symbolization of traits such as caring, compassion, fairness, generosity, helpfulness, honesty and kindness; the total scale had an alpha of 0.85. The 23-item prosocial behavior scale covered public, anonymous, emergency, emotional, compliant and altruistic forms of helping and had a total alpha of 0.84. The study assessed tendencies immediately after viewing rather than observing helping conduct, making the outcome closer to reported motivation or intention than to enacted behavior.

Narrative transportation had a strong positive bivariate association with prosocial tendencies, with a Pearson correlation of r = 0.67, p < 0.01. It was also positively associated with character identification at r = 0.22, p < 0.01, while character identification correlated with prosocial tendencies at r = 0.23, p < 0.01. Moral identity had a small, nonsignificant correlation with prosocial tendencies at r = 0.03, p > 0.05, although such a correlation does not preclude an interaction in a regression model. Statistical mediation analysis supported a small indirect association: narrative transportation was positively associated with character identification, and stronger identification was associated with higher prosocial tendencies. The estimated indirect effect was 0.012, with a bias-corrected bootstrap 95% confidence interval of 0.005 to 0.020 from 5,000 resamples. The direct association was 0.426 and the total association was 0.438, both with p < 0.001, indicating that the identified character pathway explained only a small share of the broader relationship.

The researchers then tested whether moral identity altered the link between identification and prosocial tendencies. The interaction between character identification and moral identity was significant at b = 0.106, SE = 0.040, p = 0.009, although it added only 0.36% to the model’s explained variance in prosocial tendencies. At the 16th percentile of moral identity, equivalent to one standard deviation below the mean, the association between identification and prosocial tendencies was not significant: b = 0.013, SE = 0.033, p = 0.691, 95% CI [−0.051, 0.077]. At the median it was b = 0.090, SE = 0.022, p < 0.001, 95% CI [0.047, 0.133], and at the 84th percentile it was b = 0.139, SE = 0.032, p < 0.001, 95% CI [0.077, 0.200]. The corresponding indirect association from narrative transportation through identification was not significant at low moral identity, with an effect of 0.002 and a bootstrap 95% confidence interval from −0.008 to 0.012.

At moderate moral identity, however, the indirect effect reached 0.014, with a bootstrap 95% confidence interval of 0.007 to 0.023; at high moral identity, it rose to 0.022, with an interval of 0.011 to 0.034. The index of moderated mediation was 0.017, with a bootstrap 95% confidence interval of 0.005 to 0.031, supporting a statistical difference in the indirect pathways across levels of moral identity. A Johnson–Neyman analysis indicated that the identification–tendencies association was significant when mean-centered moral identity was at least −0.2804, a range comprising about 67.8% of the sample. The researchers cautioned that this is a region of statistical significance rather than a validated psychological threshold, and they also emphasized that the interaction’s incremental R² of 0.0036 was small. The pattern therefore provides evidence that the relationship varied across moral-identity levels, but not that the moderation had a large effect.

Several diagnostics supported the internal consistency of the main model. Variance inflation factors for all predictors were below 2, the Breusch–Pagan test was not significant at χ² = 0.73, p = 0.695, and residual skewness and kurtosis were each below 1 in absolute value. A single-factor model fit substantially worse than the four-factor parceled model, and a Harman single-factor test attributed 19.20% of variance to the first unrotated factor, below the study’s 40% reference threshold. Nevertheless, an unmeasured latent method model improved comparative fit from CFI = 0.909 to 0.965, indicating that some shared method variance was probably present. In particular, discriminant validity between narrative transportation and prosocial tendencies was incomplete: their HTMT ratio was 0.86, slightly above the stated 0.85 criterion, while the measurement model’s TLI of 0.875 and RMSEA of 0.116 did not fully meet conventional thresholds. The constructs central to the proposed moderation showed clearer separation, but the large total association between transportation and prosocial tendencies still requires caution.

The design also limits how the results can be interpreted. It was cross-sectional, included no randomized condition or control group, and measured all constructs through one self-report session immediately after the film. Moral identity was also assessed after viewing, so although it is theoretically a relatively stable self-concept, the movie may temporarily have activated it and altered how participants answered its questions. The strong total correlation between narrative transportation and prosocial tendencies leaves room for overlapping measurement or unmeasured factors, even though the common-method analyses suggest that one shared factor cannot explain the entire pattern. Post hoc calculations indicated adequate power for the moderation analysis, but post hoc power cannot replace an experimental design or establish temporal order. The sample was also relatively homogeneous, and the use of one film limits generalization to other genres, narrative structures, ages and cultural settings.

The results offer a testable framework for understanding how stories may connect emotionally to social motivation. Narrative transportation theory proposes that immersion focuses attention on a story world, while character-identification theory proposes that viewers can psychologically adopt a character’s perspective and emotions. The authors argue that students who already treat moral traits as central to their identity may be more likely to translate identification with an altruistic character into a stronger prosocial orientation. This remains an interpretation of a statistical association, not evidence that a screening changes behavior, and the 2.72% indirect share should not be presented as a large effect. The practical implications are similarly tentative: pairing films that contain moral dilemmas and character growth arcs with structured discussion is a hypothesis for future testing rather than a demonstrated educational intervention. Replication with pre-film moral-identity measures, multiple films, different ages and cultural settings, and behavioral tasks involving donation or helping choices will be needed to determine whether the pattern generalizes, persists over time or reflects actual changes in conduct.

Subject of Research: How cinematic narrative transportation is associated with college students’ reported prosocial tendencies through character identification and moral-identity moderation.

Article Title: Cinematic narrative transportation and prosocial tendencies in college students: a moderated mediation model

Article References: Tang, Y., Chen, M., Deng, Y., Wei, C., Zhou, Y., Wang, L., & Yang, Y. (2026). Cinematic narrative transportation and prosocial tendencies in college students: a moderated mediation model. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 17, 1976033. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2026.1976033

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fpsyt.2026.1976033

Keywords: film psychology, narrative transportation, character identification, moral identity, prosocial tendencies, college students, mediation analysis, Chinese undergraduates, cross-sectional study, Cinematic, narrative, transportation