Draft Four: A market for drama
Draft Four: A market for drama
Stories of conflict.
Earlier this week I moderated a conversation on in-group fighting. All of us belong to a community – place-based, identitarian of all stripes, professional etc. We inhabit various roles and bubbles, which sometimes collide. Recently though, it seems the fighting has gotten worse inside the bubbles themselves, which has led some people to be excluded, others to exclude themselves to preserve their mental health.
I’ve always felt on the margins of my professional community in Romania: a journalist that is deeply naïve about what the profession could become, but also weary of the democracy-saving narrative we deploy to justify our work, which is not always as good as it could be (or as good as we claim it is).
During the event I was asked about differences of opinion I have with my journo community and my mind went here: we are too often eager to play the role of conflict entrepreneur in a society, to borrow Amanda Ripley’s term. For her, a conflict entrepreneur is as an individual or organization that profits from fueling and intensifying conflict, rather than resolving it. They thrive from keeping disputes alive, and they often stoke the fire. They sometimes go even farther, employing aggression or shaming, making a situation that much harder to resolve.
We often do this, and I also believe we do it unconsciously, because we tell ourselves a story of noble warriors, always under incredible pressures from evil forces, fighting for the public good.
GOOD NEWS MAKES BAD DRAMA
The telling of stories to ourselves, and the danger those stories pose, is what this letter is about.
Let me stay on the journalist as noble warrior narrative for a while longer. There have been numerous books published in the last decade that argue the world has never been better. Despite the polarization, and the horrors of wars, and the rise in loneliness, and the climate emergency, we, humans, have never, on average, led better lives.
Tons of data suggests we live longer, we eat better, and we are wealthier.
Doesn’t feel true though, right?
There are a few reasons for this, but journalists (it’s us, hi!) are among the culprits, writes Jonathan Gottschall in his book, The Story Paradox. Why, Gottschall asks, does the news depict that world as a desolate and hopeless place, when “objective facts about the world have brightened considerably”? Here’s a theory he offers:
Journalists feel a bit guilty about this, but they have a stock answer at hand. It’s not news’s job, they say, to tell happily-ever-after stories about the world. That’s make-believe’s job. The job of the news is to sniff out problems. After all, we can’t fix the world if we don’t know what’s wrong with it.
This is a good story in the sense that it has a certain ring of plausibility. But the heroic story journalism tells about itself is, as they say, 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. (…) Good drama, not representative truth, is the main criterion of “newsworthiness.” And good news makes bad drama.
So, the world is doing OK-ish, and journalists just lie so they can make money?
If you nodded approvingly, you are also telling yourself a story.
In this story, you are the innocent and righteous citizen, trying to go about your life, which is hard enough, and the journalist is this evil manipulator that will find you when you least expect it – just as you’re scrolling through Insta most likely in the bathroom – and hit you with a piece of gory fact: more war, a criminal on the loose, another climate disaster!
I have more bad news for you: if that’s how you see it, you are also trapped helplessly inside “the universal grammar of storytelling”. Don’t worry: we’re in this predicament together, and we can’t escape it. Nor do we have to. But it’s worth understanding what’s happening to us when we come face to face with a story.
STORIES ARE ABOUT CONFLICT
What Gottschall is saying in this book is that stories rule the world, and they rule us.
And, as the subtitle puts it, our love of storytelling builds societies, but also tears them down. His previous book, called The Storytelling Animal, told the positive version of this tale: stories are empathy machines, they allow us to see each other – warts and all –, and enable us to transform, and collaborate. Stories make us human, and they can help us build better selves and worlds.
The reason both books are true go back to this “universal grammar” thing.
Stories are about conflict.*
If there is no conflict, no tension, no problem to solve, we tune out.
They are even more powerful when they are told through a character going through this conflict, facing a problem and trying everything in their power to solve it.
And they are extra-addictive when they transport us into that world, to the point we end up disappearing into the story, sometimes merging our own problems with those of the protagonists.
This is what psychologist Jerome Bruner described as the “agency training” role of storytelling: “the way we learn how to process choices in the face of uncertainty.” Or, as the Cohen brothers put it in a recent film: “People connect the stories to themselves. And we all love hearing about ourselves. So long as the people in the stories are us, but not us.”
* I’m not saying there are no stories without conflict or where the prospect of one isn’t looming; I’m saying they have a harder time breaking through to us, because we don’t like to work for a payoff.
STORY IS MORE POWERFUL THAN DATA
In a way, a story that mixes its ingredients well is a like a drug to escape from your own world and enter another. Unbeknownst to you, in that world, you might find some answers to your own problems. Which means that, in a way, you are being manipulated. But it’d be foolish to think that data or reason or logic aren’t also forms of persuasion. Behavioral economics has long shown that we make irrational and emotional decisions even with plenty of facts at our disposal.
These letters are a small test case. Every time I write something about media economics or frameworks to understand journalism, it gets a luke-warm reaction. It’s “professional”, but not that interesting. When I write about my own struggles – with anxiety, managing time, dealing with power – you tap the hearts mightily.
The point isn’t to find someone or something that doesn’t influence us – that’s impossible. But to know that the reason “we should worry more about storytelling than other tools of sway isn't because storytellers are less moral but because they are generally more powerful.”
There is plenty of science from the past couple of decades on the power and effects of storytelling on the brain. In summary, this is what is says:
· Stories makes information easier to remember.
· Stories transport us out of ourselves.
· Stories are the bricks and mortar of our narrative identity (literally who we say we are).
· Stories are “sticky” and stories have virality.
· Stories are vehicles for emotions.
· Stories trigger all sorts of chemicals in our brains.
· Stories hook us by exploiting our addiction to negativity.
THE POWER OF BAD
Let’s stop on this last one: our addiction to negativity.
There’s this video I show almost every time I do a storytelling training.
It’s an old experiment on perception from the 1940s and what it shows are three geometric figures: a small circle, a small triangle, and a larger triangle, moving on the screen. Rationally, that’s what happens in this video – but the mind doesn’t work like that. Because our brain adapted to spot things are that new in the environment, it immediately tries to come up with an explanation. The explanation is usually a negative one, a threat. Thousands of years ago, that made sense: what made the bushes move was an animal or another human, maybe trying to attack you. So when things happen, our brain initially goes: DANGER!
(Anxiety is danger perception on steroids: everything is and can be a potential threat. That’s why treating anxiety in therapy is often a form of deprogramming and teaching the brain to stop associating all novelty with “danger”.)
So when people in this experiment looked at geometrical figures moving, they looked for the danger. The large triangle seemed stronger and more aggressive than the smaller figures, which seemed nice and playful. The large triangle was thought of as a bully, just dying to break the fun up.
Every time I show the video and ask people what they saw, this is what many say: domestic violence, a romantic triangle, kids being bullied. This is not me telling them we have a negative story on our hands. This is their own brain.
The Power of Bad is a book about how this negativity bias works, and how it can be countered. It starts with this idea: bad is stronger than good. Unpleasant, unfortunate, but true. Here’s Roy Baumeister and John Tierney going through a survey of the research literature:
Studies showed that bad health or bad parenting makes much more difference than good health or good parenting. The impact of bad events lasts longer than that of good events. A negative image (a photograph of a dead animal) stimulates more electrical activity in the brain than does a positive image (a bowl of chocolate ice cream).
The pain of criticism is much stronger than the pleasure of praise. Penalties motivate students and workers more than rewards. A bad reputation is much easier to acquire and tougher to lose than a good reputation.
HERE'S WHY THIS MATTERS
Let’s recap.
Bad is stronger than good, and it grabs our attention.
Thus, stories focus on conflict.
Many stories paint the world as a disaster zone.
Some of us become conflict entrepreneurs ourselves.
If it seems like it’s worse today, it’s because a couple of things have happened. We understand the mechanisms of story better than before. Technology has democratized access to storytelling. So everyone is now trying to influence you. Advertisers tell you that to get a date you need to buy this perfume. Politicians tell you that keeping the border closed is essential, so immigrants don’t hurt you. Influencers tell you that working for yourself is the only key to freedom. And journalists? Well, journalists have always been here to remind you that the world is going to hell.
The majority of storytellers out there don’t care much for complexity and nuance, and their narratives create binaries. Those weary of constantly being pitched to stop trusting what they read, see and hear. And we all end up more isolated and disconnected.
Many turn to conspiracy theories, which we enter as heroes that try to exert control over chaos. This is essential to remember when we think about people believing in them: they have entered a story in which they are a hero solving a puzzle (the puzzle of who is making the world miserable). In the story world of conspiracy, the brain is happy: it’s clear what the problem is, and it’s clear who is good and who is bad. One important reason fact-checking doesn’t quite work is that facts can’t beat a story. If my world makes sense now, and you tell me it’s false, why should I believe you?
To believe in conspiracies is to control your own destiny. To believe a fact-checker would leave me without a story – and since the brain goes crazy without one, I’d rather stick with the flawed one.
Manipulative politicians and other forces know this. Facts don’t matter. But telling stories of our tribe being in danger does. And it works.
Stories can make the world better. But that’s not the way many use them.
A NOTE ON ENDINGS
Many well-meaning people say the answer to all this are positive stories. Feel good stories. Ever afters.
Yes. And no.
Yes in that giving people more hope, and more agency through a story is important. No in light of everything we know about how our mind works: tell me a solely happy story, and it’ll drift off. Good is boring.
Writes Gottschall: “After subjecting summaries of 112,000 fiction plots to statistical analysis, the data scientist David Robinson reached the following pithy conclusion: ‘If we had to summarize the average story that humans tell, it would go something like, Things get worse and worse until at the last minute they get better’ (…) As soon as things are nice in our story world, we want out fast.”
My point here is not that we should give up on story.
Nor is it to say we can’t make into a bridge-building rather than bridge-burning activity.
My point is solely to make us aware of their power, their universal grammar, and their capacity to further divide us. Stories are a really sharp utensil – they can do a lot of good, and a lot of harm. What we need are more self-aware storytellers interested telling them for good, who can then find ways to package complexity in a way that keep us engaged. Now that’s story worth your time.