How Good Stories Can Change You
Article by Elissa. Originally posted on ‘The Language Brain’. Reposted with permission.
Stories are everywhere, and have been for a very long time. We read them in books, watch them on screens, hear them from friends, family, even strangers. Some are terrible or easily forgotten, like an office anecdote, or a TV advert. But then there are the stories that you just can’t put down; the stories that make you lose track of time and forget the world around you. These are the stories we remember. But why do some stories affect us like this, while others do not?
For many years, Dr Melanie Green has been trying to answer this very question. The experience is called narrative transportation and refers to reading, listening or watching a story, and feeling as if you’ve been “transported” into that story world. You have a clear image of the world in your mind, the events, the characters, their thoughts and emotions. You are so engrossed, may even lose awareness of the world around you.
The stories that tend to transport us most have good narrative quality. That is, they are coherent, have a good sense of plot and character development, and are very believable. Not that they have to imitate real life (or else no one would read sci-fi) but the characters in the story have to act believably – like real people.
The easier a story is to read, the more likely it will transport you. The same goes for production values of audio or video. If the writing or production values are poor, a story is less likely to immerse you in its world.
The more you can identify with a character, or relate to the events happening in a narrative, can also make it more engaging. You may not be able to relate to being a witch or wizard, but you may relate to all the angsty feels.
Narrative transportation can happen in both fiction and nonfiction, though some people are more likely to experience narrative transportation than others. People who tend to seek out strong emotions are more likely to be transported, and experience it more intensely.
How They Can Change You
From adverts to crime novels, transportative stories can be immensely powerful. They can inspire us to do great things or see the world in a new way. They can even shape the way we see ourselves.
More transport, more power
The more transportative a story is, the more it can change people’s attitudes and beliefs. For example, advertising that is more transportative makes people feel more positively about the products advertised. Even fictional stories can change how we see the world. People who watch a lot of crime shows tend to think the world is more dangerous than it really is (a bias known as mean world syndrome).
The power to persuade
Transportative stories also have the power to persuade us. When caught up in this story world, people are more likely to suspend their own beliefs and follow along with those of the story world. Researchers aren’t sure if this is because we’re enjoying the story, and we don’t want to stop to question it, or if being so caught up uses all of our attention so we don’t have the brain-space to be critical. From politics to data science, to fake news, persuasive storytelling is being used everywhere. But be aware: once an audience sees that you’re trying to persuade them, they tend to reject your story.
The power to change society
The power to change beliefs and attitudes has also been used for good. A radio soap opera based on “Romeo and Juliet” became popular in Kigali, Rwanda, as part of a social experiment. Researchers studied whether listening to a story about star-crossed lovers from fictional Rwandan groups, with themes of reducing prejudice, violence, and trauma, would help ease tensions between local ethnic groups. For a year, residents of Kigali listened to the fictional radio series. At the end of the year, they found that the listeners’ perceptions of social norms had changed and had become more accepting of intermarriage, trust, cooperation, and trauma healing.
Stories can change your sense of self
In highly transportative stories, people usually identify with the characters. Studies have found that when people identify with characters, they tend to adopt the beliefs of those characters. One study found that stories with a strong protagonist make the audience feel stronger too. Clearly Disney’s strong female princesses, like Brave and Frozen, are having a positive effect.
Stories make you feel
Good stories make you feel something, as anyone who has ever cried in a Pixar movie can tell you. Studies have shown that when we read about characters experiencing emotions, we actually experience those emotions too. When we read about Dolores Umbrigde forcing Harry Potter to scratch lines into his own hand using a magic quill, our brain feels his pain and anger. When our hero records a holographic message…
This emotional experience is part of what makes us feel so caught up in a story world and can lead us to change our own behaviours. Emotional stories are often used in public health messages to prompt people to quit smoking or inspire us to get active. Sadly, they can also be used to scare us, and use that fear to spread misinformation.
Interestingly, we are not always so emotionally affected when reading in a second language. A study from the Languages of Emotion Research Centre in Berlin looked at the brains of German speakers who spoke English as a second language while they read Harry Potter. Even though the participants had a very high level of English, they found that when reading in their second language, their brains did not show as much emotional activation as reading in their native language. This supports studies that suggest that using a non-native language makes us more emotionally distant.
Stories make you more empathetic
Finally, stories put you in someone else’s shoes and make you imagine the thoughts, beliefs and feelings of the characters. Psychologists call this mentalizing. Getting into someone’s mind, knowing their experiences and how they think and feel about them, is something we can’t do in real life (unless you can read minds). Reading or listening to stories is like training our own minds to better understand why people do, think and feel the way they do, which makes us better at guessing other people’s thoughts and feelings in real life. This is why researchers suggest that hearing stories about people – be they fiction, or non-fiction – makes us more empathetic humans.
Final Words
There’s nothing like getting lost in a good story. Stories make us feel, they excite us, and allow us to live an infinite number of lives. But even more than that, they have the power to change us, and the world around us. Let’s hope they’re only used for good.
