The Imaginative Engagement Scale: Development of an Instrument to Assess Cognitive Elements of Engaging with Fiction

ABSTRACT Prior research has focused on individual differences in how readers engage with narratives; however, much of this work has focused a tendency to become immersed or swept up in narratives. The purpose of the four studies reported here was to develop and validate a self-report measure tapping individual differences in a tendency to step back to think or imagine while engaging with narratives. The resulting trait Imaginative Engagement Scale (IES) contains four subscales (Coauthoring, Gap-Filling, Theory of Mind, and Reflection) and correlated with Transportability, Narrative Engageability, and Parasociability, as well as measures of media consumption. Across two studies, IES scores were more strongly related to Need for Cognition than existing measures, and no gender differences were found on the IES. In a final study, IES scores predicted story rating of and state transportation into a popular fiction story, over and above the variance explained by trait Transportability.