ABSTRACT
The phrase “perceived as fictional or non-fictional” may sound unnecessarily pedantic. Some texts may be equally well perceived as both fictional and non-fictional, and how exactly they will be perceived can be influenced by priming the reader in a particular way. In the fictional condition, it presented the horse story as taken from an actual novel whose title, author, and publisher could be easily found on the web. Fiction, then, would be a kind of thought experiment, in which agents are allowed to play out plausible interactions in a more-or-less lawful virtual world. The people in the “non-fiction” experimental condition, in turn, were told the truth: that the story they were about to read comes from a “journalistic” book by Gail Eisnitz about the workings of the American meat industry, that it portrays “real events,” is based on interviews with meat industry workers. Well, sometimes truth is stranger than fiction.
