Every journalist knows that people respond very differently to numbers and stories. A news story that says an event has taken the lives of many people may be able to get a reader’s attention for a brief moment, but it needs more to keep it. Think of reports like “A bus overturned in the Peruvian Andes today, killing 35.” Or “flooding in Bangladesh continues—aid groups believe thousands have perished.” These reports scarcely pause the coffee cup at our lips. They are hollow, meaningless. The fact that they’re often about people far away may contribute to our lack of concern, but more important is their content: They are facts and numbers. If I add some graphic descriptions (the bus tumbled down a mountain pass) or vivid images (survivors clinging to wreckage as corpses float by in the floodwater), I am far more likely to draw in readers or viewers.
But even that connection will be fleeting. To really grab people’s attention, to make them think and feel, the journalist has to make the story personal. I once sat in a Mexican hotel room idly watching a CNN story about severe flooding in the capital of Indonesia—scores dead, hundreds of thousands homeless—when I turned the channel and saw, at the bottom of the screen of a Spanish-language station, this urgent bulletin: “Anna Nicole Smith muere.” I know only a few words of Spanish, but muere is one of them. I was shocked. “Anna Nicole Smith is dead,” I called out to my wife in the bathroom. I did not inform her of the Indonesian floods, needless to say, although by any rational measure that story was vastly more important than the untimely loss of a minor celebrity. But Anna Nicole Smith was an identifiable person; the dead in Indonesia were statistics. And the loss of an identifiable person can move us in ways that statistical abstractions cannot. That’s just human nature.
Almost 3,000 people were killed that sunny morning in September 2001, but what does that statistic make us feel? It is big, certainly. But it is a cold, empty number. In itself, it makes us feel little or nothing. The best it can do is remind us of the images of the day—the explosion, the collapsing towers, the survivors shuffling through scattered paper and ash—that are infused with the emotions the number lacks. Still more potent are images of a single person, such as the horrifying photo of a man falling headfirst to his death or the businessman walking away with his briefcase and empty eyes.
Then there are the personal stories—like that of Diana O’Connor, thirty-seven, the fifteenth of sixteen children in a Brooklyn family, who had worked at three jobs to pay her way through college and whose drive to succeed earned her an executive’s office high up in the World Trade Center. Diana O’Connor may have been only one of thousands to die that day, but her story, told in a way that allows us to imagine this one person, can move us in a way that the phrase “almost 3,000 were killed” never can. There’s a reason that statistics have been called “people with the tears dried off.”
The power of personal stories explains the standard format of most feature reports in newspapers and television: Introduce a person whose story is moving, connect that story to the larger subject at hand, discuss the subject with statistics and analysis, and close by returning to the person with the moving story. It’s a sugar-coated pill, and done well, it is journalism at its best. It connects the reader emotionally but also provides the intellectual substance needed to really understand an issue. It is, however, a lot easier to tell someone’s touching story and skip the stuff in the middle, and the delightful thing—delightful for the lazy journalist, that is—is that a touching story minus analysis is just as likely to grab and hold the attention of readers and viewers as a touching story with excellent analysis.
People love stories about people. We love telling them and we love hearing them. It’s a universal human trait, and that suggests to evolutionary psychologists that storytelling—both the telling and the listening—is actually hardwired into the species.
For that to be true, there must be evolutionary advantages to storytelling. And there are. Storytelling is a good way to swap information, for one thing, which allows people to benefit from one another’s experiences. And storytelling is intensely social. Robin Dunbar of the University of Liverpool noted that while chimpanzees don’t tell stories, they do spend about twenty percent of each day picking ticks from each others’ fur. They aren’t being fastidious; they’re being social. Grooming is what chimpanzees and other social primates do to form and maintain personal bonds. Like chimps, humans are social primates. But our hunter-gatherer ancestors lived in larger bands than chimpanzees, and our ancestors would have had to spend as much as 50 percent of their time picking ticks if they were to bond as chimps do. Talking, on the other hand, is something we can do with many people at the same time. We can even talk while doing other things. That makes chat the ideal replacement for tick-picking. Studies of the ordinary daily conversations of modern humans, Dunbar notes, find little of it is instructional. Most is personal chitchat—people telling stories about people.
Storytelling can also be a valuable form of rehearsal. “If survival in life is a matter of dealing with an often inhospitable physical universe, and [of] dealing with members of our own species, both friendly and unfriendly, there would be a general benefit to be derived from imaginatively exercising the mind in order to prepare it for the next challenge,” writes philosopher Denis Dutton. “Storytelling, on this model, is a way of running multiple, relatively cost-free experiments with life in order to see, in the imagination, where courses of action may lead. Although narrative can deal with the challenges of the natural world, its usual home is, as Aristotle also understood, in the realm of human relations.” Shakespeare may have as much to tell us about psychology as psychologists do, which is why we respond to his plays as we do. When Iago whispers in the ear of Othello and Othello’s love for Desdemona turns to hate, and hate to murder, we sense that yes, this could happen. This is what jealousy and distrust can do. This is true.
But sometimes stories are not true, or least they are an incomplete guide to what is true. The stories that led to the banning of silicone breast implants were deeply personal and painful. And there were so many. It seemed so obviously true that implants cause disease. It felt true. Gut said so. “There are thousands upon thousands of women who have breast implants and complain of terrible pain,” Cokie Roberts reported on ABC News’s Nightline in 1995. “Can they all be wrong?”
The answer to that was: possibly. At the time implants were banned, there were roughly 100 million adult women in the United States. Of those, about 1 percent had implants and 1 percent had connective-tissue disease. So “we could expect by coincidence alone that 10,000 would have both,” Marcia Angell noted. The tragic stories of women who got silicone breast implants and who suffered connective-tissue disease did not, and could not, demonstrate that the implants caused the disease. What was needed were epidemiological studies to determine whether the rate of disease among women with implants was higher than it was among women without implants. If it was, that wouldn’t definitively prove that implants cause disease—there could be a third factor connecting the two—but it would be solid grounds for suspicion and further investigation. But there weren’t any epidemiological studies. Scientists opposed to the ban made this point repeatedly. So did the FDA, which insisted all along that it was banning the implants only while it awaited word from the epidemiologists. The risk hasn’t been proved, the FDA emphasized. There is no evidence. This outraged activist groups, whose slogan became “We are the evidence!” No one could doubt their sincerity, but passion and pain are no substitute for reason, and reason said there was no evidence.