THE POWER OF STORIES

Today’s professional and business worlds are dominated by facts and statistics. Points are to be made by sound argumentsand data, but perhaps we have forgotten the power of well-crafted stories.

Emily Falk, a professor of communication, psychology and marketing at the University of Pennsylvania reported that as a neuroscientist she studied what happens in our brains while hearing a story. Her experiment compares people who received messages framed as stories like, “Joe has never smoked cigarettes in his life. He has heart disease because he was exposed to secondhand smoke from his father,” to messages framed as facts, such as, “Smokers can harm other people. Every year, a lot of nonsmokers die from heart disease caused by secondhand smoke.” Upon hearing the messages, the participants were asked to come up with arguments in support of or against what they heard. Her results demonstrated that people hearing the message as a story used different brain mechanisms that operate automatically, even while under competing demands. Professor Falk concluded that competing demands reduce our ability to process facts, while stories, even with those same conditions, better increase our understanding.

In a second study, she demonstrated that stories are consistently processed in regions of the brain that help us understand what other people think and feel.

Stories can change people’s beliefs and behaviors when we become emotionally engaged and are less likely to critically evaluate the message. Listening to stories gives us new ways of seeing the world and motivate us to change our perspective. Professor Falk cautions that stories based on lies can be powerful deceptions.

An article in Forbes strongly argued that today’s leaders need to be skilled storytellers. According to a Hopi proverb, “those who tell the stories rule the world.”

Who do you see as the most skilled storytellers?