Narratives and evidence – which stories about COVID-19 did we believe and why?

Rigorous empirical evidence is often presumed to be the most persuasive, notably in fields such as healthcare and medicine, where there are established frameworks for assessing the quality of evidence. In this post, Eivind Engebretsen and Mona Baker argue for the importance of narrative rationality, especially in areas where expertise is contested. Drawing on work from their forthcoming book and taking the COVID-19 pandemic as an exemplary case, they point to how the narrative structure and context of evidence are closely related to how knowledge is communicated and adopted by different audiences.