How readers experience characters' decisions

When people read narratives, they have ample opportunities to encode mental preferences about characters' decisions. In our present project, we examined how readers' preferences for characters' decisions structure their experiences of story outcomes. In Experiment 1, participants read brief stories and explicitly rated which of two potential decisions they thought the characters should make. The actual decision that each character made was either preferred or nonpreferred by readers. By the end of each story, readers learned whether there was a positive or negative outcome to these decisions. Decisions and outcomes either matched (e.g., a preferred decision followed by a positive outcome) or did not match (e.g., a nonpreferred decision followed by a negative outcome). Participants took longer to read outcome sentences when there was a mismatch. In Experiment 2, we replicated this finding with a task that allowed more natural reading. These results provide converging evidence that readers encode responses to characters' decisions and that these responses affect the time course with which they assimilate story outcomes.