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Desrtopa comments on Rhetoric for the Good - Less Wrong
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Especially movies ? Could you elaborate on that ? I always got the feelings that books are much more powerful at moving minds than movies, at least, at moving minds for the long term. Movies tend be much more ephemeral to me, they may create strong feelings during the watching, but they get forgotten a few days afterwards. While books tend to mark me profoundly. It's especially true for movie adaption of books (they seem always more shallow than the books), but also in general, I can't name any movie which had a power on me comparable to Asimov' robots or Foundation series, Tolkien's LOTR and Silmarillion, Orwell's 1984, Zola's Germinal, Voltaire's Candide or Eliezer's HP:MoR, just to name a few from totally different genres/writing styles.
My first reaction was similar, but I think Luke is probably right. When I think of cases of people generalizing from fictional evidence, it seems to me that people are most likely to draw on movies. We may imagine books vividly, but movies are seen, and our brains developed in a context where that which was seen could be assumed to be real.
Cf lukeprog's answer to my comment, indeed, much more people see movies - so when you generalize from fictional evidence, you'll refer to movies more easily than to books, because you've more chance of the other knowing the movie.
But you know that your audience did read a book, it's not more uncommon to call to a book (LOTR, Foundation or 1984 for example) than to movies. For myself, I tend to refer to books more than to movies when I know that people did read them, but more to movies when I don't know my audience well.