I’ve always been fascinated by the power of stories. Being an avid reader myself, I love studying how stories can change people’s emotions, attitudes, and behavior, preferably for the better. To that end, my research interests lie in the intersection of three key themes:
(Interactive) stories
My passion for studying the effects of stories currently concentrates on interactive narratives. Interactive digital narratives (IDNs) are stories in which the user (or ‘interactor’) has some influence over important parts of the story, such as the story line or ending. In 2024 and 2025, I interviewed 19 younger and older adults about their experiences in ‘De eeuw van mijn opa‘, zooming in on their motivations for choices in such an interactive story. This study was funded by a seed fund from the UU strategic theme ‘Pathways to Sustainability’. In October 2025, I submitted a paper with the results to two conferences. Up next is a second paper that attempts to unravel how decision moments in IDNs affect narrative persuasion mechanisms (such as transportation and identification) and persuasive effects.
In previous years, I have collaborated with Renske van Enschot (Tilburg University) and Christian Roth (HKU Utrecht University of the Arts). Together, we aim to ’tame’ the wild field of interactive digital narratives and try to understand how such new stories can strategically contribute to change. This is no small feat, given the large diversity of perspectives on interactive narratives. In 2022, we conducted an audience study at the Betweter Festival called ‘What’s your story?‘. We asked festival visitors to experience existing interactive stories, created by journalists around several refugee-/immigration-related topics, and to tell us what they liked and disliked. I presented some insights from this study with a poster at the 2025 Etmaal van de Communicatiewetenschap.
At the festival, I was interviewed by Karlijn Meinders (BNR Nieuwsradio) for a podcast called ‘Wetenschap Vandaag’. We talked about the power of a good story. Want to hear more? You can find the podcast here.
Renske and I also also collaborated on an MA-thesis project by Judith Prins, in which we studied the interactive audiovisual climate-fiction documentary De eeuw van mijn opa. In collaboration with film maker Sam van Zoest, we were able to create non-interactive versions of this documentary, in order to test whether the interactive version was more powerful than the non-interactive version in changing people’s pro-environmental beliefs, attitudes, and intentions. (Spoiler alert: it didn’t). We presented this paper at the 2023 edition of the Etmaal van de Communicatiewetenschap in Enschede, and GoodIT ’23, the ACM International Conference on Information Technology for Social Good in Lisbon, Portugal. Following this last conference, our paper was published in the conference proceedings.
Sustainable and health outcomes
I aim to use my academic powers to contribute to key societal challenges, such as health and sustainable outcomes. Since 2025, I have an advisory role in a team with medical doctors from the Wilhelmina Kinderziekenhuis and UU-researchers from the humanities and social sciences. This team aims to evaluate a game-based educational tool on immunity and vaccination in Dutch primary schools, and received funding from the Youth Education and Life Skills-community from the UU strategic theme ‘Dynamics of Youth’ for this.
Another key challenge is climate change. I believe that individual behavior can meaningfully contribute to slowing down climate change, and that communication plays a key role in motivating people. This goes for strategic communication in general, but also stories in particular, because stories have a unique power to portray far and distant futures in a tangible way. Currently, I am working on a project by Tina Venema and Laura Weiss (in collaboration with MilieuCentraal) in which we aim to understand how hope and fear appeals in climate communication can play a role in the relation between sustainable behaviour and well-being in the Dutch population. To this end, we have collected data from a representative Dutch panel, which now awaits analysis and presentation.
Persuasive processes
Lastly, I work on projects that aim to understand how written messages can affect people’s beliefs. In past years, I’ve collaborated with Hans Hoeken on a project that aims to understand how processing fluency and gut feelings affect message acceptance and perceived convincingness of short written messages. In 2022, we published a theoretical paper on the Perceived Convincingness Model (together with Anita Eerland, Bregje Holleman, Jos van Berkum, and Henk Pander Maat). I am currently co-promotor of PhD student Ronja van Zijverden, who investigates the relationship between linguistic factors that affect processing fluency and the acceptance of information presented in written messages. This project is partly informed by the Perceived Convincingness Model and work from computational linguistics / Large Language Models.
This page was last updated on November 17, 2025.