If storytelling is so powerful, then why hasn’t the “storytelling big bang” of social media coincided with “a big bang and harmony and empathy”? Well, it has, but that empathy is for in-groups at the expense of the whole.
Social media can feed us any narrative we want: that we are smart, or behind or, above all else, that we are aggrieved by someone. This isn’t because the social platform companies want this specific outcome exactly. Rather, it’s because algorithms feed us what we want to keep us engaged, which reinforces content creators to create more of that subject matter — all of which is what these platforms do want.
In this way, storytelling is “an essential poison” like oxygen, something we need to live but which when isolated or over-concentrated can kill us. In science, that’s called “the oxygen paradox” which inspired the title of a 2021 book called “The Story Paradox: How Our Love of Storytelling Builds Societies and Tears Them Down” by professor Jonathan Gottschall. Ahead of a conference keynote I gave on “the case for storytelling” for place-based marketers, I recently reread his 2012 book Storytelling Animal, which helped me find this one.
“Story is a mercenary that sells itself is eagerly to the bad guys as the good,” Gottschall writes. They are “influence machines” and so stories aren’t moral; they’re moralistic — they can be used for good and for bad.
Gottschall and others, like Kendall Haven, Lisa Cron and many more, have popularized why a narrative about a recognizable character’s overcoming some obstacle is so enthralling to us. In short, we’ve evolved to listen with story to seek lessons for our own survival, from in-group tips to experiencing theoretical challenges we might confront.
“We think story is weak when it is strong; we think it is frivolous when it is serious,” Gottschall writes.
More than his 2012 book, Gottschall more openly includes “narrative nonfiction” in this book, rather than a narrower focus on fiction back then. Research shows we engage with nonfiction on high-alert, as opposed to the trance that fiction puts on us. But authentic people stories are effective in documentary and journalistic formats.
“The reason we should worry more about storytelling and other tools of sway isn’t because storytellers are less moral,” Gottschall writes, “but because they are generally more powerful.”
This book argues broader philosophy than practical advice, and that was just what I wanted. Still, there are lessons, such as a reminder for anyone who wants to be a better communicator: Stories are powerful but they aren’t always the best tool. All of us know that sometimes we want a friend or a source to simply provide us some fact (I, for one, rarely want the backstory on a recipe website). I strongly recommend the book.
As Gottschall reminds: Story is “our disease and our cure.”
Below I share my notes for future reference.
My notes:
- “Sway is the primary function of communication. Storytelling is a form of communication. Therefore, the primary function of storytelling is sway as well.”
- His paradox is thatstory can be used for such good and such bad: stories like hands evolved to help us but can also now be used to hurt others
- Sharon Gus definition from his Storytelling Animal book: “Humans are the animal that uses story like a tool. A tool, broadly defined, is a device we use to influence and modify the world around us.”
- “A hammer is proximately for driving nails, but ultimately for making something, say, a table. At a proximate level, stories also fill a variety of roles, including entertaining, teaching and producing meaning. But these functions are part of the larger sway-making function of storytelling, not distinct from it. Stories are influence machines, with predictable elements designed to seize attention and generate emotion toward the ultimate end of gaining different types of influence over others.”
- “Story is a precious tool for teaching and learning. But this also makes it a perfect tool for manipulation and indoctrination.”
- Storytelling is “an essential poison” like oxygen — need it but it can do great damage (that’s “the oxygen paradox” which inspires his book title)
- Story is “our disease and our cure”
- By economic calculus we spend more time within story than doing anything else, but it goes unseen
- When we read story our physiology changes
- “For storytelling’s effects on the brain, see Krendl et al. 2006; Morteza et al. 2017; Stephens, Silbert, and Hasson 2010. For lack of peripheral awareness, see Bezdek and Gerrig 2017; Cohen, Shavalian, and Rube 2015. For pupillary and blink responses, see Kang and Wheatley 2017; Nomura and Okada 2014; Nomura et al. 2015; Riese et al. 2014. For endorphin spike and increased pain tolerance, see Dunbar et al. 2016. For correlations of pleasure with measurable physiological re-sponses, see Andersen et al. 2020.”
- In a 1947 LIFE photo essay by Nat Faberman, “The Storyteller” is a shot of a traditional village gathering in which an elder tell a story and others crowd around to listen
- “The problem,“ writes the neuroscientist Antonio Dimasio “of how to make all this wisdom understandable, transmissible, persuasive, and enforceable – in a word, of how to make it stick – was faced and a solution found. Storytelling was the solution.”
- Nature communications research of Agra hunter gatherers in the Philippines: the storytellers have more popularity and mating and resources than the fishers or hunters
- Nass and Reeves: media = real life in their media equation, our brains see no difference
- Narrative transportation in story science
- Melanie Green and Timothy Brock: story can make you more supportive of harsher criminal penalties
- We read fact based arguments on high alert— fiction relaxed our defenses
- For author, a story is “an account of what happened” and in a shaped narrative “an expression of what it all meant”
- Author agrees with controversial conservative commentator Ben Shapiro’s 2011 book Prime Time Propaganda about explicit anti-conservative bias in film and TV: they are a vehicle for advancing causes (In 2015, Shapiro cofounded Daily Wire)
- America may be “the first nation to achieve the goals of empire, largely through a conquest of popular art”
- “Studies indicate that watching television with gay-friendly themes lessens viewer prejudice” (Dibble and Rosaen 2011)
- “States of pleasure are, for us, virtually synonymous with a temporary muzzling of the inexhaustibly carping inner monologue” — but story escapism is different, it’s as if we are a different person
- In Plato’s Republic (375 BC~), he wanted to banish the poets (the fiction makers, the storytellers) because of their influence
- We think story is weak when it is strong; we think it is frivolous when it is serious (that’s their power, and their risk)
- Tom van laer: Nothing is less innocent than a story
- In 1957 The Hidden Persuaders book popularized what later was found to be a scam: that James Vicary used subliminal messaging to get people to buy more popcorn and soda — all along though storytelling itself was subliminal messages. (The data was faked but the story kept on)
- “The reason we should worry more about storytelling and other tools of sway isn’t because storytellers are less moral, but because they are generally more powerful.”
- “Scientifically speaking: First, we love stories and storytellers. Second, stories are processed and remembered longer. Third we stay focused on them. Fourth we spread them. And last they produce emotion (Bower and Clark 1969; Dahlstrom 2014; Graesser 1980; Haidt 2012; Kahneman 2011)
- Stories are life, Hitchcock said, “with the dull bits cut out”
- Apocryphal story of Hemingway writing in a bar “for sale baby shoes” demonstrates show not tell or what is called “retrospective reflection” — integrating ideas from a story into life
- Telling gives the meaning (gets the point); showing forces us to find the meaning (feels the point)
- DARPA Stories, Neuroscience and Experimental Technologies STORYNET (Paul Zak involved)
- Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon (1791) designed to make you believe you were being watched even when you weren’t; the digital version wants to make you believe you aren’t being watched even when you are
- Jaron Lanier “behavior modification empires”
- May 21, 2016: Internet research agency in Russia told stories to start and rally members both from The Heart of Texas and United Muslims of America to protest against each other (IRA trains former journalists and pr folks)
- Facebook was our Trojan horse all along (the original full Trojan horse story involves a live storyteller convincing the Trojans to the horse inside their gates)
- Plato’s Republic was told as the voice of Socrates, using story (like the allegory of the cave) to condemn story: perhaps intentional because he shows his philosopher kings would need engineered story to control everyone
- Karl Popper’s The Open Society (1945) takes Plato literally and so is highly critical of the Republic showing how to be a totalitarian
- In What is Art (1898), Tolstoy defines it as emotional infection
- We still create folk tales: kidneys removed after partying in Las Vegas; or eating pop rocks and soda ((Subliminal messages themselves are a kind of modern folk tale of questioning authority)
- Politically orientated tweets: every additional emotional word made 20% more likely to be retweeted
- Two kinds of emotions: activating (rage and elation) and deactivating (contentednsss and despair)
- Rodney Stark in The Rise of Christianity (1996): high Christian birth rates and timed with plagues in Roman Empire that shook people’s faith in their old gods — Bart Ehrman (Triumph of Christianity in 2018) added that as a collection of stories (good news) Christianity spread organically, rather than by the sword as a later powerful church: built-in missionary virality (must spread the word) and monotheistically intolerant — later heaven and hell binary gave clear emotional terms and immediate (Jesus could return right now)
- Bunk: conspiracy theories are better stories than debunked conspiracy theory (Reminds me of the 2017 book called Bunk)
- Raymond Mar: “reader attitudes shift to become more congruent with the ideas expressed in a narrative”
- Moon landing is a great story (Right Stuff) but it is over and done with — but a faked moon landing is an active conspiracy (an ongoing story)
- Joseph Campbell’s hero journey stress with the call to adventure
- Conspiracy theories often do require smart folks to spike narrative
- Flat earthers aren’t science warriors but story warriors: the conspiracy is protecting some other story (Original Parallax flat earthier dude was a Bible creationist) : inside conspiracy you’re a hero but if you admit being wrong, you lose status
- Toby Ord’s Precipice is so longterm but Keeping up with Kardashians gives immediacy — in group learning
- Climate change is a bad story because it is long term and we are both the villains and the protagonists but more importantly it is a deactivating one because the scale of the problem is so big
- “The reason conspiracies of goodness can’t compete against conspiracies of darkness is simple. They make bad stories. They’re too dull to seize attention and because they don’t pose a morally urgent problem. They don’t call us to enter the tales as heroes or at least open our mouths and breathe them around like viruses.”
- Story wars
- Daniel Fessler: our “negativity bias” encourages negative stories — we are part of the problem
- Breaking story form can be artistic but isn’t really story anymore: “there’s a paradox about Finnegans Wake: It’s known as one of the greatest novels a human has ever penned. But it’s also a novel that’s so maddeningly hard and weird (one critic refers to it as an act of “linguistic sodomy”* that almost no one can stand to actually read it. I’m a literature PhD and, aside from a Joyce scholar I once knew, I’ve never met a single colleague who claims to have read the whole thing or has been greatly tempted to try.”
- Chomsky’s controversial universal grammar reminds of a storytelling grammar: stories are about characters solving predicaments and have a moral dimension
- “Avante garde word art” is Joyce’s Finnegans Wake — not a story
- Nietzche: the poets were always the valets of some morality
- Data researcher David Robinson: “If we had to summarize the average story that humans tell it would go something like things get worse and worse until at the very last minute they get better.”— joy is short
- Oliver Morin and Oleg Sobchuk: being a character in a story is a dangerous place to be
- Robert Michembled: “blood and gore sold ink and paper” — but news always followed our own bias
- Betsi Grabe: “compelling negativity is the most persistent news selection principle”
- Journalism like any effective storytelling is only based on a true story. “Journalism is a storytelling guild, which like all other storytelling guilds is trapped helplessly inside the universal grammar of storytelling, with no plausible hope of escape. The history of the news business shows that there is in fact, little market for news per se and never has been. There’s only a market for drama. And from the beginning, the news business has been just one branch of the drama business, where the elements of the universal grammar – the plots, characters, themes, and implicit ethical lessons – must be cobbled together for real life. Good drama, not representative truth, is the main criterion of newsworthiness.”
- “When it comes to stories almost nothing is good unless it’s bad”
- As Plato wrote “virtue is not necessarily the best choice of subject for a man who wants to write a beautiful epic or drama; the poet must subordinate his love of virtue to the requirements of his art .”
- “In fiction, things typically get worse and worse until, at the very end, they get better. Because made up stories tend to end happily, psychologists find that heavy fiction consumers, when compared to heavy news consumers, have a greater confidence that they live in “a nice world” rather than “a mean world”.… News stories on the contrary, typically start mean and end mean too”
- Steven James: “Coincidence is necessary to get a story started but is often deadly at the end”
- Christopher Boehm demonstrated most hunter gatherers were communal so the author and others (such as authors of 2012 book Graphing Jane Austen) demonstrate how much more good-bad morality stories have, than compared to real life
- Main protagonists are “the transformational character”, who evolve — the antagonist typically does not
- Robin Dunbar’s 1996 book “Grooming Gossip and the Evolution of Language:” human language evolved for story, reinforcing tribal rules and norms — far longer as communal oral tradition
- Stories aren’t moral they’re moralistic — can be used for good and for bad
- The Greek word that gave us history and story implied judgement
- Dolf Zillmann: a story renders the consumer “a moral monitor”
- Yeats: the falcon cannot hear the falconer
- New Dawn: Dutch NGO soap opera and its effects on post-genocide Tutsis and Hutu
- Inventing Human Rights (2007) author Lynn Hunt argued the novel developed 1700s empathies (Uncle Toms Cabin etc etc)
- “Bad theory data fit” why has a storytelling big bang not coincided with a big bang of harmony and empathy? Well it has but empathy for in-groups at the expense of the whole
- “ Story is a mercenary that sells itself is eagerly to the bad guys as the good”
- Janet Burroway: “conflict is the fundamental element of fiction”
- Carl Deutsch: “A nation is a group of people united by a mistaken view of the past and a hatred of their neighbors”
- David Rieff: counter to the saying “ the overall point of this book is that sometimes – maybe more often than not – amnesia is better than memory” because remembering the history holds grudges
- Alex Rosenberg: all history is a fiction piecing data together
- “Narrative history, I propose, can be defined as the imposition of the imagination of the present on the defenseless corpse of the past.”
- Plato: what matters most about a story: if it’s true or if it does good? The lie that drives virtue
- Myth I was American exceptionalism that got torn down in 1960s and replaced with Myth II from noble lies to ignoble truths —myth II is still about American exceptionalism but now it’s exceptionally evil
- “No story ever happened” — they’re interpretations of the past
- Any Chua’s 2007 Day of Empire: every hyperpower starts off as more tolerant than its competitors (to absorb human capital), before the coalition breaks apart
- EM Forster’s 1927 “Aspects of the Novel”: make characters “round”
- Heider Simmel visualization research on triangles
- The Enigma of Reason by Mercier in 2007: we aren’t rational beings we are rationalizing beings
- We devote “Our mental resources not to testing our narratives, but to protect protecting them”
- 30-50% of the cause of our politics are our genes
- “All evidence suggest that we are no more responsible for the smart or dumb stories that fill our skulls than a depression in the Earth is responsible for grooming up with pure or fitted waters… It is natural for us to conclude that people who have bad beliefs are bad people. But this conclusion is a stark non sequitur. “Bad people” in the main are simply those who had the misfortune first to encounter, and then to believe the wrong storytellers.”
- 20th century leftists told us mass media was a technology of horrifying conformity. Now fractious media is a technology of horrifying division. Really their point is they want their stories to win at the expense of others.
- From Mclulhan’s global village in mass media to Zuckerberg’s social media
- Rather than together we now consume story alone
- Trump storytelling went to battle with liberals and conservatives and his stories won out
- Trump taught “American politicians how frail and weak reality is and how easily it can be overpowered by the right type of fictions told with all in commitment “
- Science communication, journalism and academia are our institutions for mediating but they’ve become diminished: just because it’s a right wing talking point doesn’t mean it isn’t true
- Cass Sunstein; put diverse people in the room, they’ll cone to agreement, put like minded people they’ll go extreme
- Soroush Vosoughi in Science: lies trounce truth
- Lucas Bietti: “Storytelling is arguably the primary social activity by which collective sense making is accomplished”
- His three rules: resist the story; empathy for the storyteller and sympathy for others consumed by story
- That’s his call to adventure for us: to compel story to help us