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?

During some conflicts, the words people choose to use can tell us alot about how they view and understand the disagreement, and how they might begin to see ways to resolve it. Consider this exaggerated example to make the point: Two neighbors are in a dispute over damage done to a fence by a downed tree. In describing the conflict, one of the neighbors talks about how it had been a real “battle” to get his neighbor’s attention. When they did talk, it was like “lobbing grenades over the fence at each other” until his neighbor “dropped the bomb” that he did not intend to pay the costs of repairing the fence. In this case, the neighbor describes the conflict as warfare. 

The way we talk about a conflict shapes the way we perceive and react to it. The words and language used to describe a conflict do, in fact, construct an image in our minds of the clash itself. We actually construct our perception of a conflict from our narrative description of events. As the neighbor continues to react to the rivalry as war, he may begin to think less about repairing the damage to the fence and more about defeating his neighbor.

When we understand how the party in conflict is perceiving the encounter we can begin to enter into his perception by our choice of words. For example, we might ask how we can get “a ceasefire” so “talks can begin.” Another approach is to encourage the development of a “counterstory” that could lead to cooperative collaboration. For example, a counterstory to the tree-damaged fence could be a “weather disaster” that requires the parties to work together to “clean up the damage” and “get people’s lives back to normal.” 

Some studies of workplace bullying have shown how victims talk about their victimization. Some compare the bullying they experienced to a game or competition that was unfairly weighted in the bully’s favor, in which they were wounded or hurt. Others compare such bullying to a nightmare or torture and to being forced to accept a noxious substance. The perpetrators were characterized as dictators, royalty or evil demons. The victims described themselves as prisoners, children or heartbroken lovers who had lost a beloved job as a result of the tormenter.

On a societal level, think about our language to describe how we select political leaders—candidates who will “fight” for us in the “campaign” are “points” ahead and will be “victorious.” Thus, there can be counterstories even to the political process.