The Science of Storytelling

by Will Storr

  So we fight back. We might do so by trying to convince our opponent of their wrongness and our rightness. When we fail, as we usually do, we can be thrown into torment. We chew the conflict over and over, as our panicked mind lists more and more reasons why they’re dumb, dishonest or morally corrupt. Indeed, language provides a stinking rainbow of words for people whose mental models conflict with ours: idiot, cretin, imbecile, pillock, berk, arsehole, airhead, sucker, putz, barnshoot, crisp-packet, clown, dick, divot, wazzock, fuckwit, fucknut, titbox, cock-end, cunt. After an encounter with such a person, we often seek out allies to help talk us down from the disturbance. We can spend hours discussing our neural enemies, listing all the ways they’re awful, and it feels disgusting and delicious and is such a relief.

  We organise much of our lives around reassuring ourselves about the accuracy of the hallucinated model world inside our skulls. We take pleasure in art, media and story that coheres with our models, and we feel irritated and alienated by that which doesn’t. We applaud cultural leaders who argue for our rightness and, on encountering their opposite, feel defiled, disturbed, outraged and vengeful, perhaps wishing failure and humiliation on them. We surround ourselves with ‘like-minded’ people. Much of our most pleasurable social time is spent ‘bonding’ over the ways we agree we’re right, especially on contentious issues. When we meet people who have unusually similar models to us, we can talk to them nonstop. It’s so blissful, reassuring ourselves like this, that time itself seems to vanish. We crave their company and put photos of them – arms across shoulders, smiles in beams – on our fridges and social-media feeds. They become friends for life. If the circumstances are right, we fall in love.

  It’s important to note, of course, that we don’t defend all our beliefs like this. If someone approached me and argued that they can prove that every bipartite polyhedral graph with three edges per vertex has a Hamiltonian cycle, or that the Power Rangers could beat the Transformers in a fight, it would have little effect on me. The beliefs we’ll fight to defend are the ones which we’ve formed our identity, values and theory of control around. An attack on these ideas is an attack on the very structure of reality as we experience it. It’s these kinds of beliefs, and these kinds of attacks, that drive our greatest stories.

  Much of the conflict we see in life and story involves exactly these model-defending behaviours. It involves people with conflicting perceptions of the world who fight to convince each other of their rightness, to make it so their opponent’s neural model of the world matches theirs. If these conflicts can be deep and bitter and never-ending, it’s partly because of the power of naive realism. Because our hallucination of reality seems self-evident, the only conclusion we can come to is that our antagonist, by claiming to see it differently, is insane, lying or evil. And that’s exactly what they think of us.

  But it’s also by these kinds of conflicts that a protagonist learns and changes. As they struggle through the events of the plot, they’ll usually encounter a series of obstacles and breakthroughs. These obstacles and breakthroughs often come in the form of secondary characters, each of whom experiences the world differently to them in ways that are specific and necessary to the story. They’ll try to force the protagonist to see the world as they do. By grappling with these characters, the protagonist’s neural model will be changed, even if subtly. They’ll be led astray by antagonists, who’ll represent perhaps darker and more extreme versions of their flaw. Likewise, they’ll learn valuable lessons from allies, who are often the embodiment of new ways of being that our hero must adopt.

  But before this dramatic journey of change has begun, our protagonist’s neural model will probably still be convincing to them, even if it is, perhaps, beginning to creak at its edges – there might be signs that their ability to control the world is failing, which they frantically ignore; there might be portentous problems and conflicts which rise and waft about them. Then something happens …

  Good stories have a kind of ignition point. It’s that wonderful moment in which we find ourselves sitting up in the narrative, suddenly attentive, our emotions switched on, curiosity and tension sparked. This often occurs when we sense an unexpected change has taken place in the plot that sends tremors to the core of the protagonist’s flawed theory of control. Because it goes to the heart of their particular flaw, this event will cause them to behave in an unexpected way. They’ll overreact or do something otherwise odd. This is our subconscious signal that the fantastic spark between character and event has taken place. The story has begun.

  Typically, as their theory of control is increasingly tested and found wanting, the character will lose control over the events of the plot. In an archetypal tale, the more they struggle to regain control, the more trouble and chaos they’ll often cause. The drama that is triggered compels the protagonist to make a decision: are they going to fix their flaw or not? Who are they going to be?

  The cultural model that the butler Stevens had, in The Remains of the Day, was nineteenth-century British. It contained core beliefs about the value of dignity and emotional restraint. His model told him that these attributes were the best way to control his environment – that if you behaved with dignity and emotional restraint you would be safe and ultimately rewarded. This theory of control defined him.

  And it had been true, in one place and time. But, when we first met Stevens, all that was changing. The power of the British aristocracy that he and his father served, and to which he owed these values, was fading, as was the power of Britain itself. For Stevens, the main practical consequence of these epochal shifts was that his new employer at Darlington Hall, Mr Farraday, was not an English Lord but an American businessman. This was an unexpected change that would challenge the very foundations of who Stevens was. It’s a classic ignition point.

  As the story starts, Stevens is struggling to meet the challenge of Farraday’s not being able to afford the full complement of fourteen staff. Trying to keep the house running with just four people leads him to make ‘a series of small errors in the carrying out of my duties’ that vex him. But the arrival of his new boss triggers another problem, one that seems to preoccupy Stevens even more: Farraday’s ‘unfamiliarity with what was and what was not commonly done in England’. Specifically, that his employer enjoys ‘conversation of a light-hearted, humorous sort’ and has a ‘general propensity to talk with me in a bantering tone’.

  This bantering makes Stevens profoundly uncomfortable. It’s a direct attack on his identity, his beliefs, his theory of control. Bantering isn’t what respectable people did. It isn’t how you got on. It isn’t dignified. It invites not emotional restraint but emotional warmth, and that way lies chaos.

  On the one occasion Stevens tries to make a joke, it fails humiliatingly. He proves reluctant to change his core beliefs and his brain, as brains do, provides him with powerful excuses not to.

  It is quite possible that my employer fully expects me to respond to his bantering in a like manner, and considers my failure to do so a form of negligence. This is, as I say, a matter which has given me much concern. But I must say this business of bantering is not a duty I feel I can ever discharge with enthusiasm. It is all very well, in these changing times, to adapt to one’s work to take in duties not traditionally within one’s realm; but bantering is of another dimension altogether. For one thing, how would one know for sure that at any given moment a response of the bantering sort is truly what is expected? One need hardly dwell on the catastrophic possibility of uttering a bantering remark only to discover it wholly inappropriate.

  2.6

  We’re all fictional characters. We’re the partial, biased, stubborn creations of our own minds. To help us feel in control of the outside world, our brains lull us into believing things that aren’t true. Among the most powerful of these beliefs are the ones that serve to bolster our sense of our moral superiority. Our brains are hero-makers that emit seductive lies. They want to make us feel like the plucky, brave protagonis
t in the story of our own lives.

  In order to make us feel heroic, the brain craftily re-scripts our pasts. What we actually ‘choose’ to remember, and in what form, warps and changes in ways that suit the heroic story it wants to tell. When, in the laboratory, participants split money with anonymous people in ways that they themselves considered unfair, they were found to consistently misremember their own selfish behaviour, even when offered a financial incentive to recall the truth. ‘When people perceive their own actions as selfish,’ the researchers concluded, ‘they can remember having acted more equitably, thus minimising guilt and preserving their self image.’

  Our sense of who we are depends, in significant part, on our memories. And yet they’re not to be trusted. ‘What is selected as a personal memory,’ writes Professor of psychology and neuroscience Giuliana Mazzoni, ‘needs to fit the current idea that we have of ourselves.’ This isn’t simply a matter of strategic forgetting. We rewrite and even invent our own pasts. Work by Mazzoni and others has shown that memories can be detailed, vivid and emotional and yet entirely invented. ‘We often make up memories of events that never happened,’ she writes. Memories are ‘very malleable, they can be distorted and changed easily, as many studies in our lab have shown’.

  For the psychologists Professors Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson, the most important memory distortions ‘by far’ are the ones that serve to ‘justify and explain our own lives’. We spend years ‘telling our story, shaping it into a life narrative that is complete with heroes and villains, an account of how we came to be the way we are’. By this process, memory becomes, ‘a major source of self-justification, one the storyteller relies on to excuse mistakes and failings’.

  But the hero-maker lie goes far beyond memory. The psychologist Professor Nicholas Epley catches it in action when he asks his business students whether they’re inspired to pursue careers in industry for heroic ‘intrinsic’ reasons – doing something worthwhile, pride in achievement, the joy of learning – or more suspect ‘extrinsic’ ones – pay, security and fringe benefits – and then say the same for their contemporaries. They give matching results every year. They show, writes Epley, ‘a subtle dehumanisation of their classmates. My students think all of these incentives are important, of course, but they judge that the intrinsic motivators are significantly more important to them than they are to their fellow students. “I care about doing something worthwhile,” their results say, “but others are mainly in it for the money.”’

  The hero-maker begins with our automatic and mostly subconscious emotional hunches. Say we have models of the world that include racist or sexist beliefs – that give us subtle sensations of ‘no’ when we encounter black people or white people or women or men. Because we start out convinced we’re a good person, then it only logically follows there must be a good reason for our negative feelings. So the hero-maker goes on a mission to find them. And it does a good job. It’s convincing. After all, who better to fool us – to know exactly what to say to beguile us into believing our most incendiary and partisan instincts are morally justified – than our own mind? If we’re a good person, the money we stole from our boss must be because they’ve been exploiting us. If we’re a caring person, our political efforts to degrade the NHS must be an altruistic desire to increase efficiency or patient choice. At least that’s my take on that situation. That’s the moral truth that feels as inarguably real to me as rocks and trees and double-decker buses, because it’s made out of the same stuff as those things. I’m blind to any other reasonable argument – I can’t perceive them – because they’re not part of my perception.

  Everyone who’s psychologically normal thinks they’re the hero. Moral superiority is thought to be a ‘uniquely strong and prevalent form of positive illusion’. Maintaining a ‘positive moral self-image’ doesn’t only offer psychological and social benefits, it’s actually been found to improve our physical health. Even murderers and domestic abusers tend to consider themselves morally justified, often the victims of intolerable provocation. When researchers tested prisoners on their hero-maker biases, they found them to be largely intact. The inmates considered themselves above average on a range of pro-social characteristics, including kindness and morality. The exception was law-abidingness. There, sitting in prison, serving sentences precisely because they’d made serious contraventions of the law, they were only willing to concede that, on law-abidingness, they scored about average.

  The hero-maker delusion is implicated in more misery, fury and death than is possible to calculate. Mao and Stalin and Pol Pot believed they were right, as did Hitler, whose last words before shooting himself were, ‘The world will be eternally grateful to National Socialism that I have extinguished the Jews in Germany and Central Europe.’ Indeed, the brains of even the lowliest Nazis automatically generated reasons why what they were doing was morally correct. In the Holocaust’s early stages, ordinary middle-aged Germans were recruited to efforts to exterminate Jews. One, a 35-year-old metal worker, remembered, ‘it so happened that the mothers led the children by the hand. My neighbour then shot the mother and I shot the child that belonged to her, because I reasoned with myself that, after all, without its mother the child could not live any longer. It was supposed to be, so to speak, soothing to my conscience to release children unable to live without their mothers.’

  Researchers have found that violence and cruelty has four general causes: greed and ambition; sadism; high self-esteem and moral idealism. Popular belief and clichéd stories tend to have it that greed and sadism are dominant. In fact, they’re vanishingly small. It’s actually high self-esteem and moral idealism – convictions of personal and moral superiority – that drive most acts of evil.

  In Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, the antagonist Amy Elliott Dunne is motivated, in part, by her pathologically high self-esteem. She’s driven to frame her husband for her murder not because of his affair, precisely, but because of what his affair would do to her perceived reputation. On discovering his infidelity, she writes in her diary,

  I could hear the tale, how everyone would love telling it: how Amazing Amy, the girl who never did wrong, let herself be dragged, penniless, to the middle of the country, where her husband threw her over for a younger woman. How predictable, how perfectly average, how amusing. And her husband? He ended up happier than ever. No. I couldn’t allow that … I changed my name for that piece of shit. Historical records have been altered – Amy Elliott to Amy Dunne – like it’s nothing. No, he does not get to win. So I began to think of a different story, a better story, one that would destroy Nick for doing this to me. A story that would restore my perfection. It would make me the hero, flawless and adored. Because everyone loves the Dead Girl.

  A hero-maker narrative based on moral superiority is convincingly captured in Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory, which is set in Mexico during the persecution of the Catholic Church. When a murderous police lieutenant examines a photograph of a wanted priest, the emotion comes first: ‘Something you could almost have called horror moved him’. Next comes the self-justifying memory, followed instantly by a hero-maker narrative that ties it all together so that the killer is reassured he’s a moral actor:

  he remembered the smell of the incense in the churches of his boyhood, the candles and the laciness and the self-esteem, the immense demands made from the altar steps by men who didn’t know the meaning of sacrifice. The old peasants knelt there before the holy images with their arms held out in an attitude of the cross: tired by the long day’s labour … and the priest came round with the collecting-bag taking their centavos, abusing them for all their small comforting sins, and sacrificing nothing at all in return … He said, ‘We will catch him.’

  A character’s conviction in their rightness and superiority is precisely what gives them their terrible power. Great drama often forms itself around a clash of competing hero-maker narratives, one belonging to the protagonist, the other to their foe. Their respective moral perceptio
ns of reality feel utterly genuine to their owners and yet are catastrophically opposed. These are neural worlds that become locked in a fight to the death.

  2.7

  As irrational as we can be, it’s important not to infer from all this that we’re incapable of ever thinking straight. Of course, reason has power, people can think sensibly and minds can change. It’s relatively rare, though, for people to shift significantly on the beliefs around which they form their identity, such as Ishiguro’s butler Stevens’s convictions about the value of emotional restraint. It’s these brave souls we mythologise in story.

  One such real-life hero is the former ‘eco-terrorist’ Mark Lynas. He belonged to a ‘radical cell’ of the anarchist environmental group Earth First and would hack down experimental genetically modified crops in the night. Earth First told a kind of David and Goliath story about the world, in which the overwhelming forces of industrialism were bringing about, ‘environmental apocalypse. Big corporations and capitalism in general were destroying the earth.’ Mark’s struggle was against the monstrous machines of profit. ‘We were protectors of the land and the inheritors of the natural forces,’ he said. ‘We were the pixies.’

  But when he discovered that the science of genetically modified food didn’t confirm what his neural models had been telling him, he went through a painful public conversion. As he did, his brain scripted a new story of the world, one in which he could still feel heroic. He’d once perceived the green movement as the brave, scrappy underdogs. But the more he looked now, the more little David took the form of Goliath. ‘Just take the numbers,’ he said. ‘Greenpeace, the whole international group, is a $150m outfit. Bigger than the World Trade Organisation, and much more influential in terms of determining how people think. And there’s very deep networks of money and power and influence there too.’