Story: How Stories Deceive
"When a fact is plausible, we still need to test it. When a story is plausible, we often assume it’s true."
This article made me think of a recent commercial for "60 Minutes" I saw where instead of pushing the program as news, they were touting it as a story-telling TV show. I was put off by it when I saw it because telling a story requires no facts to be told and is, IMO, a step down from real news.
But we now live in a time where our long history of telling stories to one another is gaining ground on fact-based news as a means of learning something, even though what we "learn" this way is much more likely to be fraudulent.
A good story is something that we easily remember, which is one of the reasons it works. We remember it largely because we can relate to the emotional hooks in a good story which make it easy to recall when we encounter those emotions again. A set of facts is something we have a much harder time to recall and fit into our everyday lives because the emotion has been largely stripped away; we don't readily see the relevance to ourselves. This is why overblown stories about terrorists resonate, but facts about climate change do not motivate people. In addition, being entertained is something we wish to recall, whereas being bored isn't.
It would do us a world of good to be skeptical of any claimed facts when we feel too emotionally attached to the story within which they were delivered.
"When a fact is plausible, we still need to test it. When a story is plausible, we often assume it’s true."
This article made me think of a recent commercial for "60 Minutes" I saw where instead of pushing the program as news, they were touting it as a story-telling TV show. I was put off by it when I saw it because telling a story requires no facts to be told and is, IMO, a step down from real news.
But we now live in a time where our long history of telling stories to one another is gaining ground on fact-based news as a means of learning something, even though what we "learn" this way is much more likely to be fraudulent.
A good story is something that we easily remember, which is one of the reasons it works. We remember it largely because we can relate to the emotional hooks in a good story which make it easy to recall when we encounter those emotions again. A set of facts is something we have a much harder time to recall and fit into our everyday lives because the emotion has been largely stripped away; we don't readily see the relevance to ourselves. This is why overblown stories about terrorists resonate, but facts about climate change do not motivate people. In addition, being entertained is something we wish to recall, whereas being bored isn't.
It would do us a world of good to be skeptical of any claimed facts when we feel too emotionally attached to the story within which they were delivered.
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