The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human

by Gottschall, Jonathan

  The list could go on and on. But it actually proves very little, because the interesting question isn’t whether stories sometimes change people or influence history, but whether those changes are predictable and systematic. A skeptic might yawn at this list and say, “Anecdotes don’t make a science.”

  In recent decades, roughly corresponding with the rise of TV, psychology has begun a serious study of story’s effects on the human mind. Research results have been consistent and robust: fiction does mold our minds. Story—whether delivered through films, books, or video games—teaches us facts about the world; influences our moral logic; and marks us with fears, hopes, and anxieties that alter our behavior, perhaps even our personalities. Research shows that story is constantly nibbling and kneading us, shaping our minds without our knowledge or consent. The more deeply we are cast under story’s spell, the more potent its influence.

  Most of us believe that we know how to separate fantasy and reality—that we keep information gathered from fiction safely quarantined from our stores of general knowledge. But studies show that this is not always the case. In the same mental bin, we mix information gleaned from both fiction and nonfiction. In laboratory settings, fiction can mislead people into believing outlandish things: that brushing their teeth is bad for them, that they can “catch” madness during a visit to a mental asylum, or that penicillin has been a disaster for humankind.

  Think about it: fiction has probably taught you as much about the world as anything else. What would you actually know about, say, police work without television shows such as CSI or NYPD Blue? What would I know about tsarist Russia without Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky? Not much. What would I know about British naval life in the Napoleonic era if not for the habit-forming “Master and Commander” novels of Patrick O’Brian? Even less.

  And it is not just static information that is passed along through stories. Tolstoy believed that an artist’s job is to “infect” his audience with his own ideas and emotions—“the stronger the infection, the better is the art as art.” Tolstoy was right—the emotions and ideas in fiction are highly contagious, and people tend to overestimate their immunity to them.

  Take fear. Scary stories leave scars. In a 2009 study, the psychologist Joanne Cantor showed that most of us have been traumatized by scary fiction. Seventy-five percent of her research subjects reported intense anxiety, disruptive thoughts, and sleeplessness after viewing a horror film. For a quarter of her subjects, the lingering effects of the experience persisted for more than six years. But here’s what’s most interesting about Cantor’s study: She didn’t set out to study movies in particular. She set out to study fear reactions across all mass media—television news, magazine articles, political speeches, and so on. Yet for 91 percent of Cantor’s subjects, scary films—not real-world nightmares such as 9/11 or the Rwandan genocide by machete—were the source of their most traumatic memories.

  The emotions of fiction are highly contagious, and so are the ideas. As the psychologist Raymond Mar writes, “Researchers have repeatedly found that reader attitudes shift to become more congruent with the ideas expressed in a [fiction] narrative.” In fact, fiction seems to be more effective at changing beliefs than nonfiction, which is designed to persuade through argument and evidence. For example, if we watch a TV program showing a sexual encounter gone wrong, our own sexual ethics will change. We will be more critical of premarital sex and more judgmental of other people’s sexual choices. If, however, the show portrays a positive sexual encounter, our own sexual attitudes will move toward the permissive end of the spectrum. These effects can be demonstrated after a single viewing of a single episode of a prime-time television drama.

  As with sex, so too with violence. The effects of violence in the mass media have been the subject of hundreds of studies over the past forty years. This research is controversial, but it seems to show that consuming a lot of violent fiction has consequences. After watching a violent TV program, adults and children behave more aggressively in lab settings. And long-term studies suggest a relationship between the amount of violent fiction consumed in childhood and a person’s actual likelihood of behaving violently in the real world. (The opposite relationship also holds: consuming fiction with prosocial themes makes us more cooperative in lab settings.)

  It is not only crude attitudes toward sex and violence that are shaped by fiction. As mentioned in the last chapter, studies have shown that people’s deepest moral beliefs and values are modified by the fiction they consume. For example, fictional portrayals of members of different races affect how we view out-groups. After white viewers see a positive portrayal of black family life—say, in The Cosby Show—they usually exhibit more positive attitudes toward black people generally. The opposite occurs after white people watch hard-core rap videos.

  What is going on here? Why are we putty in a storyteller’s hands? One possibility, to borrow the words of Somerset Maugham, is that fiction writers mix the powder (the medicine) of a message with the sugary jam of storytelling. People bolt down the sweet jam of storytelling and don’t even notice the undertaste of the powder (whatever message the writer is communicating).

  A related explanation comes from the psychologists Melanie Green and Timothy Brock. They argue that entering fictional worlds “radically alters the way information is processed.” Green and Brock’s research shows that the more absorbed readers are in a story, the more the story changes them. Fiction readers who reported a high level of absorption tended to have their beliefs changed in a more “story-consistent” way than those who were less absorbed. Highly absorbed readers also detected significantly fewer “false notes” in stories—inaccuracies, infelicities—than less transported readers. Importantly, it is not just that highly absorbed readers detected the false notes and didn’t care about them (as when we watch a pleasurably idiotic action film); these readers were unable to detect the false notes in the first place.

  And in this there is an important lesson about the molding power of story. When we read nonfiction, we read with our shields up. We are critical and skeptical. But when we are absorbed in a story, we drop our intellectual guard. We are moved emotionally, and this seems to leave us defenseless.

  Anton Chekhov (1860–1904). Stories change our beliefs and maybe even our personalities. In one study, psychologists gave personality tests to people before and after reading Chekhov’s classic short story “The Lady with the Little Dog.” In contrast to a control group of nonfiction readers, the fiction readers experienced meaningful changes in their personality profiles directly after reading the story—perhaps because story forces us to enter the minds of characters, softening and confusing our sense of self. The personality changes were “modest” and possibly temporary, but the researchers asked an interesting question: might many little doses of fiction eventually add up to big personality changes?

  There is still a lot to be discovered about the extent and magnitude of story’s sculpting power. Most current research is based on extremely low doses of story. People can be made to think differently about sex, race, class, gender, violence, ethics, and just about anything else based on a single short story or television episode.

  Now extrapolate. We humans are constantly marinating ourselves in fiction, and all the while it is shaping us, changing us. If the research is correct, fiction is one of the primary sculpting forces of individuals and societies. Anecdotes about those rare ink people, such as Rienzi or Uncle Tom, who vault across the fantasy-reality divide to change history are impressive. But what is more impressive, if harder to see, is the way stories are working on us all the time, reshaping us in the way that flowing water gradually reshapes a rock.

  HOLOCAUST, 1933

  Adolf Hitler is a potent example of the ways that story can shape individuals and histories, sometimes disastrously. The musical stories that Hitler most loved did not make him a better person. They did not humanize him, soften him, or extend his moral sympathies beyond his own in-group. Quite the opposite.
Hitler was able to drive the world into a war that cost sixty million lives not in spite of his love of art but at least partly because of it.

  Hitler ruled through art, and he ruled for art. In his book Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics, Frederic Spotts writes that Hitler’s ultimate goals were not military and political; they were broadly artistic. In the new Reich, the arts would be supreme. Spotts criticizes historians who treat Hitler’s devotion to the arts as insincere, shallow, or strictly propagandistic. For Spotts, “Hitler’s interest in the arts was as intense as his racism; to disregard the one is as profound a distortion as to pass over the other.”

  Adolf Hitler practicing theatrical poses for use in speaking performances. Hitler once called himself “the greatest actor in Europe.” Frederic Spotts agrees, arguing that Hitler’s mastery of public theater helped him mesmerize and mobilize the German people. After watching the Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will (1935) fifteen times, the singer David Bowie said, “Hitler was one of the first great rock stars. He was no politician. He was a great media artist. How he worked his audience! He made women all hot and sweaty and guys wished they were the ones who were up there. The world will never see anything like that again. He made an entire country a stage show.”

  On the night of May 10, 1933, Nazis across Germany indulged in an ecstasy of book burning. They burned books written by Jews, modernists, socialists, “art-Bolsheviks,” and writers deemed “un-German in spirit.” They were purifying German letters by fire. In Berlin, tens of thousands gathered in the firelight to hear Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels shout, “No to decadence and moral corruption! . . . Yes to decency and morality in family and state! I consign to the flames the writings of Heinrich Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Ernst Gläser, Erich Kästner.” And with them went the ink children of Jack London, Theodore Dreiser, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Mann, and many others.

  The Nazis, deeply inspired by Wagner’s musical stories, understood that ink people are among the most powerful and dangerous people in the world. And so they committed a holocaust of undesirable ink people so there would be fewer barriers to a holocaust of real people.

  Among the books burned that night in 1933 was the play Almansor (1821) by the German Jewish writer Heinrich Heine. The play contains this famous and prophetic line: “Where they burn books, they will also ultimately burn people.”

  8. Life Stories

  “How old was I when you first took me in a boat?”

  “Five and you nearly were killed when I brought the fish in too green and he nearly tore the boat to pieces. Can you remember?”

  “I can remember the tail slapping and banging and the thwart breaking and the noise of the clubbing. I can remember you throwing me into the bow where the wet coiled lines were and feeling the whole boat shiver and the noise of you clubbing him like chopping a tree down and the sweet blood smell all over me.”

  “Can you really remember that or did I just tell it to you?”

  “I remember everything.”

  —ERNEST HEMINGWAY, The Old Man and the Sea

  DAVID WAS, AT THIRTY-ONE, a drunk and a junkie. The day before he got fired was St. Patrick’s Day, and David got really tuned up on booze and cocaine. The next day was the worst of David’s life. He dragged himself into the offices of the magazine where he worked, feeling cadaverous, and may have brought himself back to life by snorting lines from the bottom of his desk drawer. The editor called David to his office and told him that keeping his job meant going to rehab. David said, “I’m not done yet.”

  David obediently cleaned out his desk and then hit the bars with his best friend, Donald. They drank whiskey and beer all day, and kept drinking deep into the night. Between drinks and bars, they snorted coke in bathrooms and alleys. Bouncers ejected them from one club for various outrages, and then the two friends tussled with each other in the club parking lot. Donald got sore and went home. David went to a different bar to drink and to seethe about Donald abandoning him.

  David rang Donald at home. “I’m coming over,” he threatened.

  “Don’t do it,” Donald replied. “I have a gun.”

  “Oh really? Now I’m coming over for sure.”

  David may have walked to Donald’s house or driven; he can’t remember. But when he arrived, he quickly grew bored of knocking at the locked front door and instead attacked it with his feet and his shoulders.

  When Donald opened the door, he had the pistol in his hand. He warned David to calm down or he would call the police. David shouldered Donald aside and stumbled for the kitchen, punching through a window on the way. David seized the kitchen phone and presented it to Donald, his hand streaming blood. “All right, call ’em motherfucker! Call ’em! Call the goddamned cops!”

  To David’s surprise, Donald did. Within minutes, a patrol car pulled up at the house. David fled through the back door, racing toward his apartment eight blocks away, hiding in bushes and alleys as the cops gave chase. David reached his apartment and, bleeding steadily from his hand, passed out.

  Twenty years later, David Carr was a columnist for the New York Times, working on a memoir of his life. Early in the process, he interviewed his old friend Donald. First, David told Donald what he remembered of the worst day of his life. Donald listened, nodding and laughing through most of the story: that was how he remembered it, too. But when David got to the part about the gun, Donald frowned.

  Donald said that David’s account was right except for one detail: David was the one with the gun in his hand.

  Carr writes in his memoir, The Night of the Gun, “People remember what they can live with more often than how they lived.”

  For his memoir, Carr didn’t rely solely on his memory. He went out and reported extensively on his own life. He did this for two reasons. First, Carr had spent much of his life drunk and stoned out of his mind; he knew his memory was cooked. Second, he was writing in the turbulent wake of James Frey’s fraudulent memoir, A Million Little Pieces, and he knew readers would be skeptical of over-the-top details in (yet another) ex-junkie’s memoir of triumph over addiction.

  In A Million Little Pieces, Frey describes his sordid career as a drunk, crack addict, and outlaw who finally got straight. It is a gripping read, and an uplifting one. It was the uplifting part that got Frey on The Oprah Winfrey Show. And because Frey got on Oprah, he sold truckloads of books and made millions in royalties. It was the gripping part of A Million Little Pieces that got Frey on the Smoking Gun as the subject of a masterpiece of debunking called “A Million Little Lies.”

  Most of the “stranger than fiction” details of Frey’s book were actually just regular old fiction. Some points were merely embellished. For example, during his second appearance on Oprah, Frey said that the story about having root canals during rehab was absolutely true—except for that part about refusing Novocain. Other details were entirely fabricated, such as the one about Frey being wanted by the law across several states. Pundits howled in protest. Frey crawled back on TV to let Oprah ritually eviscerate him. The rest of us leaned back and enjoyed the spectacle.

  But Frey’s inventions were nothing compared to some other recent memoirs. In Memoir: A History, journalist Ben Yagoda shows that lying memoirs are as old as books, but that the past forty years “will probably be remembered as the golden age of autobiographical fraud. There has been about a scandal a year, and sometimes more than that.” For example, there was Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years (1997). Misha tells the story of a little Jewish girl’s miraculous survival in Nazi Germany. Her adventures included getting trapped in the Warsaw ghetto, stabbing a Nazi rapist, trekking across Europe on foot, and being adopted—like Mowgli in Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book (1894)—by a pack of kindly wolves. Only none of it was true—not the part about the kindly wolves, not even the part about Misha (real name Monique De Wael) being Jewish.

  And then there’s my favorite example, The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams (2000), one of three highly regarded memoirs by a Nati
ve American writer called Nasdijj, who was the victim of fetal alcohol syndrome, homelessness, and rampant white prejudice. Elsewhere, Nasdijj wrote, “My literary lineage is Athabaskan. I hear Changing Woman in my head. I listen to trees, rocks, deserts, crows, and the tongues of the wind. I am Navajo and the European things you relate so closely to often simply seem alien and remote. I do not know them. What I know is the poetry of peyote, the songs of drums, and the dancing of the boy twins, Tobajishinchini and Neyaniinezghanii.” And so on.

  Nasdijj turned out to be Timothy Barrus, a white North Carolina writer of sadomasochistic gay erotica. Another celebrated Native American memoir, The Education of Little Tree (1976), turned out to have been written by a white guy named Asa Carter (pen name Forrest Carter), a former leader of a paramilitary organization called “the Original Ku Klux Klan of the Confederacy.”

  Asa Carter (pen name Forrest Carter) railing against integration in Clinton, Tennessee. Carter was a “virulent segregationist, former Klansman, speechwriter for [Alabama governor] George Wallace and professional racist.” His fraudulent memoir of Native American boyhood has sold more than 2.5 million copies.