How To Tell Stories That Move People - Will Storr

Why are stories so persuasive?

Well, stories are persuasive because, um, humans think in stories. Uh, our, our brains remix reality and turn that reality into a narrative, you know, with ourselves at the center. So, you know, storytelling is sense-making for the human brain. We haven't evolved to think in data, algorithm. We've evolved to process reality in the form of stories. A story is always gonna be the most persuasive, you know, um, technology out there. It's, story's also always gonna be the thing that persuades people, uh, most of all.

Is it kind of ironic that in the modern world, a lot of the time we're told to take great heed of rationality and, uh, data and statistics and stuff like that, but you've got to disregard all of that personification and narrative and archetypes and religion and mythology? You know, that's sort of, that's very unsophisticated.

Yeah.

It, it doesn't really meet the criteria by which we judge what's happening in the modern world. Uh, so you're asking people to get rid of the stuff which to them feels most real and is persuasive, which is story and archetype and mythology and personification and blah, blah, uh, and to start to believe in the thing which is the most sterile and, and, and novel and sort of, uh, uh, alien to us.

Absolutely. And, uh, and I think there's a huge naivety out there that, that, that, you know, especially in, you know, what you might call our world of, you know, we like to think of ourselves as rational people, atheistic people, uh, people who are interested in data and science. And, and as if, it, it, amongst our people, there's a very naive idea that, um, that, that we are the ones who are led by data. I mean, I remember, uh, earlier in my career as a journalist interviewing a famous skeptic, Steven Novella, who, who used to, um, present a podcast called The, The Skeptics Guide to the Universe, and he very confidently told me that, that skeptics were kind of immune to irrationality because they were kind of tuned, uh, to be, you know, automatically skeptical about crazy beliefs. Um, and, and I just think that's sort of deeply naive. You know, like, um, what, what you'll find especially, you know, you see it all the time in the era of social media, is that, um, you know, even scientists in, you know, not even, scientists as much as anybody else, they, they start with a story and then they find the data to back up their story. So you can find, you know, academics who know way more than you or I, both of us put together about human biology, who believe in that kind of woke idea of, uh, y- y- y- you know, um, biolo- you know, biology, gender biology, and you know, y- you know, why are men better than women at certain things. You know, they, they, they could find all the, all the data in the world to tell you that that's not true, even though we believe that it is true. So, so, you, you know, you can take someone like Jordan Peterson on the one hand and Adam Rutherford on the other hand, two very smart men-