Throughout human history, stories have influenced people to make big decisions – to fight, follow, explore, marry, build, worship, hunt, vote and much besides.
Small wonder then that stories still hold that power to influence the decision-making brain. We tell stories in all areas of our lives and we should be telling stories in our business lives too.
Okay, we might not be trying to cajole an army to war but persuading people to buy, subscribe, save, comment, review, invest, share, try – or, for membership organisations, to join – requires powerful narratives, nonetheless.
To explain why, we need to look at the history, biology and structure of storytelling. It’s a big topic so I’ll cover it in three parts. In this, the first, we need to start with the prevalence of stories.
The storytelling animal through history
The evolutionary theorist Jonathan Gottschall famously described humans as “Storytelling Animals” and it’s easy to see why.
Our entire lives are bound up in stories. We’ve been writing them down for thousands of years and telling them over campfires for tens of thousands of years.
In fact, stories began before language in the form of dreams. Humans are thought to spend at least two sleeping hours per night scripting and screening stories in the theatres of our minds.
When dawn breaks, the stories do not stop. In fact, daydreaming is the mind’s default state. Neuroscientists have calculated that we spend nearly half of our waking hours – or a third of our time here on Earth – in storyland, spinning fantasies.
But we don’t have to be asleep or daydreaming to be immersed in stories. When we listen to music, we’re listening to a story, most often about a protagonist trying to attract a lover. The dinner table is a place of storytelling. Young children shape their own stories constantly at play.
We read less than we used to – around 20 minutes a day – but the page has been supplanted by the screen. We spend an average of three and a half hours a day watching TV, almost all of it fiction or real life told as stories in the form of documentaries and news. Even adverts tell stories.
The video games our teenagers play increasingly enact stories, and we spend many hours on social media telling the stories of our lives and reading the stories of others.
Outside the home, you don’t need to visit a theatre or cinema to discover stories. All of culture and public lives are immersed in stories. Sport, for example, works far better with a strong back story.
Tiger Woods winning the golf Masters in 2019 wouldn’t have been nearly as interesting without the backstory of his rise from the ashes of lurid sex scandals and legal troubles. Religions, whatever you believe about their veracity, are collections of stories.
Even the law works better with stories. Johnnie Cochran, the lawyer in the OJ Simpson case, said to his team: “We’re here to tell a story. Our job is to tell our story better than the other side tells theirs.” And despite a mountain of physical evidence against OJ, including blood in his car and at the scene, the prosecution failed to get a conviction. What they forgot to do was tell a story.
How and why did storytelling begin?
One simple theory is that good storytellers since the dawn of communal living have been liked and respected and were therefore more likely to find a mate and the storytelling gene proliferated.
A more prevalent – and, to my mind, plausible – explanation is that stories serve as flight simulators where it’s possible, in a safe mode, to run through life’s potential social problems.
Think about your dreams; they are nearly always replete with problems. Someone chases you. You fall from a moving car. You turn up to do a conference speech unprepared. They are a rehearsal stage, or a mental gym.
In the same way, literature offers feelings for which we don’t have to pay. It allows us to love, condemn, condone, hope, dread, and hate without any of the risks those feelings ordinarily involve.
A third theory about the evolution of storytelling – my favourite – is that our brains are physically wired for story. That’s where we’ll pick up in part two of our tour through storytelling.
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