Differential effects of individual versus consensus evaluations of narrator-to-story fit on the experience and outcomes of narrative listening.

While a reader might imagine the narrator's and characters' voices in a written book, a spoken narrative solidifies the relationship between the narrator and the text. Here, we report two experiments investigating how perceived narrator-to-story fit affects narrative listening enjoyment and other listening outcomes. In a first experiment (N=400 participants), we manipulated the gender-related congruence between the expected and heard narrator of four spoken narratives in a willingness-to-wait paradigm. We found that listeners were more likely to continue listening to congruent than incongruent stories, but did not enjoy them more or comprehend them more accurately. However, we observed a dissociation in the observed effects of perceived narrator-to-story fit: specifically, higher individual evaluations significantly increased enjoyment, while both higher individual and (aggregated) mean fit ratings predicted greater motivation to continue listening. This suggested that crowd-sourced data may be less effective than personal taste when predicting narrative listening enjoyment. Indeed, a second experiment using a larger number of stories showed that participants’ enjoyment of spoken narratives is most strongly predicted by within-sample individual fit ratings, but not by within- or between-group aggregate ratings. Our findings provide evidence to support personalisation of narration as a way to promote enjoyment of spoken narratives and, potentially, audiobooks.