Should I distrust storytelling?
A massive protest was raging outside the Embassy where I lived and worked. Days earlier, Ambassador Christopher Stevens and his colleagues were killed during a protest in Benghazi, and we were on edge and preparing for the worst. Intelligence reports screeched threat warnings from every direction. A hundred thousand enraged protesters surrounded our compound, burning epitaphs of our president and cursing the United States. We could hear their “DEATH TO AMERICA” chants from inside the office where we had barricaded ourselves for safety. A pair of Marine Security Guards ran by the door with assault rifles cradled in their arms. In the surreal moment, the determined looks on their faces reminded me of actors in war movies.
A message arrived from Washington: “Do not engage the protestors.” I was furious. I knew in my bones that DC’s reaction was dangerously wrong. The politicians did not understand what was happening out here, nor did they understand the people at the center of the protests. The window to avert a disaster was closing rapidly.
I knew I had to act. “Get Mullah Rahman on the phone for me. Quickly. If we don’t find a way out of this thing, people are going to die.”
What happens next offers a vital lesson about the power of diplomacy. And it is a timely reminder about the importance of building strong relationships across cultural boundaries.
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How has the start of this story made you feel? Has your pulse quickened a bit? Are you eager to hear how it ends?
Storytelling is a powerful tool for policymaking and advocacy. Rousing one’s emotions is an unparalleled technique for getting others into action supporting a cause. It is an ancient and potent way to transmit knowledge. Tragic and triumphant stories are shared at our dinner tables, light up our silver screens, and line on our bookshelves.
That is why I distrust the use of storytelling in my work.
The Danger of Storytelling
Here we sit at the dawn of a new information age. Knowledge has never been more accessible, but truth has never been more contested. Stories provide us with simple conclusions, but the world is complex.
When storytelling activates an emotional response, our ability to critically evaluate information is obscured. In many ways, storytelling is the antithesis of evidence and objectivity. Stories fundamentally require a subjective lens. The techniques used to weave compelling narratives conflict with those necessary for objectivity. The goal of a story is to trigger an emotional response in your audience. The goal of evidence and science, on the other hand, is to appeal to rationality.
Storytelling focuses on the rare and extraordinary. Expertise, in contrast, focuses on consistently linking cause and effect. It requires comparisons among different instances to more accurately explain how the world actually works.
It is hard to evaluate the substance of someone else’s story through the lens of science. A child’s story is no less true (or false) than a king’s. Storytelling eludes evaluation of right and wrong. It confines itself to a particular perspective at a particular moment in time. Storytelling is powerful because it’s personal, a momentary passage into someone else’s reality. Like Rashomon, everyone experiences the same moment differently.
Storytellers are manipulators. Nothing requires that storytellers maintain fidelity to reality. My story at the start of this article is no exception. That story is only loosely based in reality, adapted from my experience as a diplomat over a decade ago. I admit to taking some poetic liberties. Does that make it any less True? (Well, yeah. Probably.)
Must experts also be storytellers?
Though I spent five years in a political science doctorate program, I have always wanted to push for policy change in ways beyond what academia offered. But I’m not a natural storyteller. At the helm of my young think tank, fp21, I’ve had many people tell me, “Nobody wants to just read evidence – tell an exciting story!”
Scientists are boring. They always seem to lose public debates. Climate scientists, for instance, have been advised to ditch the charts and statistics and start telling more stories. The message is: Don’t tell us that an average of 420 billion tons of ice is melting away from Antarctica and Greenland every year, or even that the ocean is rising more than an inch every 8 years – tell us a story about the child you met whose doll collection was covered in black mold after her coastal Louisiana home was flooded. Make your science come to life!
But this is a fraught path.
The first problem is that liars are often much better at weaving compelling narratives, freed from the heavy burden of actually backing their claims with science and evidence. Our world is becoming saturated with disinformation, pseudo-science, and conspiracy theories.
Another challenge is that we may ask too much of a scientist to be great at research and storytelling. When we rely on scientists to do both, both tasks will suffer. Like Ginger Rogers, scientists are being asked to dance just as well as the non-scientists, but backwards and in heels. It is unsurprising that science seems to so often lose in the court of public opinion.
Further, scientific findings rarely offer straightforward, satisfying stories. Results are often complicated, probabilistic, and framed with many carefully worded caveats. It is impossible to make a confidence interval or a p-value sound cool! Such complexity makes for bad storytelling: “...and the princess lived happily ever after. (note that I measured ‘happiness’ using a self-reported Likert-scale survey of royal attitudes, but other scholars have disputed the validity of this approach (see Grimm & Grimm, 1812).”
Some scientists can overcome these challenges. I love when a compelling story helps bring a new scientific finding to life. So, of course, storytelling and science can coexist.
But it is dangerous to depend on the popularity and rhetorical power of the storyteller. to shape our views rather than the quality of scientific findings underlying their claims.
Develop a healthy distrust of storytelling
Relying on storytelling to be our most important social technology for the transfer of knowledge is a risky proposition. When we rely too much on our AI chatbots and social media feeds, we unwittingly wander into magical kingdoms that may be compelling but untrue. Our policy environments decouple from reality, and the foundation of our democracy erodes. It already feels like that’s happening, doesn’t it?
Sure, storytelling is a powerful tool. It makes us human. But we must also have a healthy distrust for storytelling. We must continue to develop our collective abilities to think critically about the science and evidence that underlies our claims.
This is doubly true for our leaders. They must aspire to be cutting-edge knowledge consumers and producers. They must value expertise, and teach the rest of us to do the same.