11.2 Advantages of Stories

There are no guarantees that skill in storytelling will make someone fall in love with you, especially someone who wants to kill you, but it will reap other benefits. Getting and keeping people’s attention is an obvious one, and some real-life storytellers have outdone even Scheherazade. The soap opera Guiding Light ran for more than 70 years, beginning as a radio drama in 1937, switching to television in 1952, and airing 18,262 episodes before ending in 2009. The public demand for stories is insatiable: American film studios (collectively known as “Hollywood”) produce over 400 movies a year, and Indian studios (known as “Bollywood”) make even more. Video games, which began as simple graphic games, have evolved into full-scale narratives. Other forms of entertainment that don’t appear to be story-based, such as the Olympic games and singing competitions, are now driven by the life stories of the athletes and singers. And while television commercials could simply show off a product’s features or create Pavlov’s dog-type associations with desirable products, advertisers have learned that the best way to prevent people from hitting the mute button is to tell a 30-second story.

One reason stories keep our attention so well is because they create emotional engagement: they get us to care about things that we might not otherwise care about. Journalists know that a report about a hurricane should not contain only facts and figures: if you want to “hook” the reader, begin with the story of one individual or family. The tsunami that struck the Indian Ocean in December 2004 produced an incomprehensible loss of life: 228,000 people died in one day. But that kind of statistic is too abstract to be emotionally gripping. If you want people to be engrossed, there is no better way than to tell the story of one person, such as tsunami survivor Maria Belon (depicted in the 2012 film The Impossible, which, like Schehezarade’s tales, is not the kind of movie you want to leave unfinished). If you want to frustrate people, don’t tell them how a story turns out. Think of 9-1-1 operators, who have a career that everyone knows is stressful. You may not, however, have thought about this challenging aspect of their job: they are continually hearing the beginning of the most dramatic stories in people’s lives, but almost never get to hear the ending.

A curious side benefit of emotional engagement is empathy for the protagonist — the central character of a story, whether it’s a hero we admire or a villain we detest. Usually the villain is a person who is trying to defeat the protagonist, but sometimes the central character is an “anti-hero” with less-than-admirable traits or habits. There is something about seeing the story from their point of view that makes us understand them and instinctively root for them. Consider how many movies there are about contract killers and jewel thieves — they’re not normally the kind of people most of us feel sympathy for in the real world, yet in the movies, if they’re the central character, we cheer them on. Even if you’re not a fan of McDonald’s restaurants, the Miracle Mop, or nuclear bombs, you may find yourself rooting for Ray Kroc in the biopic The Founder, Joy Mangano in Joy, or Robert Oppenheimer in Oppenheimer. Experimental studies have shown that reading literary stories enhances empathy,^[1] and movie critic Roger Ebert called the whole genre of film “a machine that generates empathy.”

Stories have the effect of “making it real” for the audience: helping people grasp what something is like in a more visceral way than statistics and disembodied descriptions can. Implications and details become more clear when the audience can see how things really work. A film like The Revenant shows people what it’s like to survive a bear attack and how to prevent yourself from freezing to death; A Star Is Born shows the downsides of achieving great success as an entertainer.  Stories are instructive, offering guidance on how to handle new situations, which is why Chip and Dan Heath refer to stories as “flight simulators for the brain” in their 2007 book Made to Stick.^[2] In technical fields such as photocopier repair, “shop talk” (e.g., sharing stories about dealing with a puzzling machine) is a vital way for technicians to learn from each other.

Stories are more memorable than other forms of information. Jurors in a patent infringement trial, for instance, are likely to be overwhelmed by the detailed information they hear, from product specifications to dates when an infringing product appeared on the market, and most people will lose track of all those facts and dates. However, if the trial also involves the story of Joe, an employee leaving Company A (which owns a patent) and going to work for Company B (which starts producing a suspiciously similar product soon after Joe arrives), all the jurors will remember that story.^[3] And unless you are a genius at memorization, your capacity to remember a list of names and places without context would be reached in minutes (perhaps seconds), but fans of the Lord of the Rings film trilogy can remember nine hours worth of plot and characters.

Stories provide a framework for interpreting detail. When new information is presented to an audience in the context of a well-told story, they immediately grasp the meaning and significance of that information — like the camera flash in Get Out or the title character being able to put her feet flat on the ground in Barbie. This may be a minor point in the movie world, but it has great import in the trial world. In some ways, trials can be seen as competing stories; to prevent jurors from being overwhelmed by all of the detailed evidence presented to them, they need to know from the story framework what each piece of evidence means.

Consider the tragic tale of South African runner Oscar Pistorius. What makes it tragic is not the fact that Pistorius had both feet amputated before his first birthday. Thanks to prosthetic legs, he was able to become a sprinter, first competing in the Paralympic Games and then, in 2012, in the regular Olympic Games (where he was nicknamed “blade runner” because of the shape of his artificial feet). This was enough to make him a superstar in South Africa, and he began dating model Reeva Steenkamp. But things turned tragic in the early morning hours of Valentine’s Day, 2013, when Pistorius shot Steenkamp dead.

What happened? It depends on who you ask. According to Pistorius, he heard a noise coming from the bathroom and thought it was an intruder, so he reached for the pistol under his bed, called for Steenkamp (who he thought was still in bed) to call the police, and shot through the bathroom door four times in self defense. According to the prosecutor, what happened was premeditated murder: Pistorius got in an argument with Steenkamp, who was so afraid for her life that she locked herself into the bathroom, and Pistorius killed her in a rage. Among the evidence gathered were 1,700 text messages between the two, including one Steenkamp sent three weeks before she was killed, reading “I’m scared of you sometimes, of how you snap at me.” Is this damning evidence, or the kind of thing that normal people say about occasional harsh comments between them? That depends on how the story of their relationship had been told up to that point. (Pistorius was found guilty of murder).

Finally, stories overcome resistance and leave the listener in freedom to form their own opinions and learn their own lessons. Chapter 6 discusses how people push back against overtly persuasive messages such as “Humans are destroying the planet by filling it with trash,” but those same people will happily sit through a charming story about a little robot named Wall-E who, well, cleans up a planet that was destroyed by filling it with trash. In Ancient Greece, storytellers like Aesop may have been fond of explicitly stating the moral of their stories — such as “Slow and steady wins the race” in the fable “The Tortoise and the Hare” — but there is nothing to stop audiences from taking an entirely different lesson from the same story. In B.J. Novak’s short story “The Rematch,” he argues that the first race was a fluke and that, and unless it’s caught completely off guard, a hare will easily beat a tortoise every single time, so perhaps the moral ought to be “Slow doesn’t win the race unless your opponent makes a really stupid mistake.”

Stories are, by their nature, joint ventures between the teller and the audience, which means that the meaning conveyed depends in part on the individual audience member’s state of mind.

Given all of these advantages, it’s no wonder that there’s been a “storytelling boom” in fields such as politics, medicine, marketing, and social media.^[4] Is it really surprising that a young child who asks her parent to read a bedtime story every night grows up to become a lawyer who greets every new client with “Tell me what happened to you,” a doctor who listens to dozens of patients’ stories every day, a war correspondent who begins their report with “Tonight’s top story is…,” or a blogger who makes her living telling the world what it’s like to live out of a van?