Motivational Alignment, Not Demographic Similarity, Predicts Narrative Interest

Why do people become interested in some stories but not others? A long-standing assumption is that narrative engagement is driven by demographic-similarity between the audience and the protagonist. Across two preregistered experiments (N = 953), we systematically manipulated the protagonist’s gender, race, age, and motivation in short story pitches, and asked participants—who varied in their own gender, race, age, and motivational priorities—to rate their interest. This preregistered controlled design allowed us to compare demographic-similarity with a theoretically grounded alternative: motivational alignment, defined as the match between a protagonist’s current motivation and the observer’s own motivational priorities. Motivational alignment reliably predicted narrative interest and remained a significant predictor even when demographic-similarity was included in the same model. We also found no evidence that demographic-similarity predicts interest, even when specific information about the protagonist’s motivation was absent. These findings identify motivational alignment as a central determinant of narrative interest.