Once upon a time,
I heard science as stories.
I recall them well.
Storytelling and narrative are fundamental in almost every aspect of our lives. We are storytelling animals, narrative helps us to make sense of the world.
The ethnologist Kurt Ranke and communication scholar Walter Fisher both independently coined the idea that humans are “homo narrans” – storytelling animals who are persuaded to make decisions based on the coherence and fidelity of stories. Psychologist Jerome Bruner describes this ‘narrative mode of thought’ as being concerned with human wants, needs, and goals. Stories “help people make sense of the facts by framing them with particular narratives about how the world works” (Davidson, 2017).
The consequence of humans organising our thoughts through stories is that they tend to stick in the brain.
Numerous studies have shown that narrative and storytelling increase interest in and recall of information, and can be effectively employed in science communication. Hong & Lin-Siegler (2012) found that adding narrative to bare facts “increased student interest in science, increased their delayed recall of key science concepts”. Narrative “improves information processing, increasing recall of and interest in, the story” (Martinez-Conde et al. (2019).
Framing scientific information as stories increases the impact and power of the communication, but narrative can do more than just stimulate interest and improve recall. A study by Morris et al. (2019) found that “narratives framed as stories consistently outperformed factual narratives for encouraging action-taking in all audiences.”
Stories can change our behaviour.
In their 2002 book The Science of the Discworld II: The Globe, novelist Terry Pratchett and science writers Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen conclude with this sentence:
“Plenty of creatures are intelligent but only one tells stories”
It’s a lovely statement that perfectly encapsulates the importance of narrative and storytelling to our place as a species. It’s also 17 syllables long.
Further reading:
Davidson (2017) Storytelling and evidence-based policy: lessons from the grey literature https://doi.org/10.1057/palcomms.2017.93
Hong & Lin-Siegler (2012) How learning about scientists’ struggles influences students’ interest and learning in physics https://doi.org/10.1037/a0026224
Martinez-Conde et al. (2019) The storytelling brain: how neuroscience stories help bridge the gap between research and society https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1180-19.2019
Morris et al. (2019) Stories vs. facts: triggering emotion and action-taking on climate change https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-019-02425-6
Pratchett et al. (2002) The Science of the Discworld II: The Globe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Science_of_Discworld_II:_The_Globe