Storytelling: Influence Beyond Logic

Richard Bolstad

Personal Stories are More Powerful than Logical Persuasion

How do we influence people individually to alter their values and sorting processes, their biases of experience? How do we become an effective “consultant” in values and belief based issues like health care and climate change? The answer, I believe, lies largely in storytelling, or what NLP calls “therapeutic metaphor”.

VitalSmarts is a business involved in influencing positive change around the world. The VitalSmarts group started their search for influencing skills with the question: “How do people naturally change their values?” Their negative conclusion is very simple: people do not usually change as a result of rational arguments – in fact rational argument usually convinces people that their old view was correct. Their positive conclusion is also simple, and consistent with what we find when we ask people to remember great influencers: values or priorities (and thus values-laden behaviours) change when people have profound experiences where they model the new value from someone they can identify with. When they have that experience they need to believe that the change in behaviour will feel good to them (i.e. it will be valuable), and to believe that it will be possible for them to achieve. That modelling can be done vicariously with stories.

Here’s an example from their book “Influencer” (Grenny et alia, 2013). David Poindexter is the founder of Population Communications International, which focuses on research on the use of entertainment to deliver pro-social messages aimed at improving the quality of life of audiences in the United States and abroad. During the decade of the 1970s, Poindexter was successful in mobilizing the producers and creators of numerous prime-time U.S. television shows, such as Maude, Allin the Family, The Mary Tyler Moore Show and others, to incorporate discussions of family planning (birth control) and ending sexual stereotyping into the context of these shows. Starting in 1993, he and Martha Swai ran a radio drama called Twendena Wakati (Change with the Times) in Tanzania. The program dealt with AIDS transmission.

In Africa, AIDS prevention has faced resistance from people with a number of conspiracy theories – that AIDS is not caused by a virus but by western immunizations, that there are magical cures being suppressed by western medical authorities, that AIDS is a western plot to exterminate Africans, that AIDS is biological warfare, and in South Africa that AIDS is an Apartheid plot etc. (Sivelä, 2015). Here is an example, from a High School Student: “‘Some say it came here with Americans. During the apartheid era they injected HIV into black people because they knew that no white person would sleep with a black person. They wanted all blacks to die… During history class, our teacher told us that when there was apartheid here, there was apartheid also in Germany. There in Germany, Hitler was killing people, so the Americans went to him and said that what he was doing was right, and wanted to know how he did it. So, he [Hitler] advised them to infect people with HIV. Hitler was killing all the Jews in Germany so that only the Germans would be left there. And so the Americans decided that if they infect us with HIV, then we will die and they will have our land to themselves’ (Nyaniso, 17, Masiphumelele, February 2011).” These kind of beliefs are notoriously hard to “argue away” because they are based in realistic emotional fears (created for example by centuries of colonial violence).

Poindexter and Swai designed their radio drama to explore the AIDS situation in a story about a Tanzanian family.  Polling showed that the main male character in their story, Mkwaju, was initially an attractive macho role model to male listeners. He was abusive to his wife, drank excessively, and had sex with prostitutes regularly. However, opinions shifted over the course of the program. As he died of AIDS, his wife, Tenu, made the decision to leave him, and set up her own successful business. By 1997 listenership of this program increased to an average of 66% country-wide, or almost two thirds of the adult population. 82% of listeners said they adopted a method of HIV/AIDS prevention as a direct result of listening to the programme; 25% of new family planning adopters in Tanzania identified Twende Na Wakati as the reason. The Dodoma area of Tanzania was excluded from radio transmission for this program in the years 1993-1995, as an experimental control. The ongoing tragedy in the Dodoma (where AIDS related behaviour did not change) resulted in this controlled part of the experiment being ended after two years in order to share the benefits the rest of the country received (Singhal and Rogers, 1999, p 131-134, and p 152-171).

How do metaphorical stories create this kind of influence? Greg Stephens, Lauren Silbert and Uri Hasson at Princeton University (2010) first demonstrated that when one person tells a story and another person listens, the two people show synchronised brain activity. This “rapport” does not occur where mere facts are transmitted, and is probably due to the activation of sensory imagery evoked by the story in both teller and listener. They summarise “Verbal communication is a joint activity; however, speech production and comprehension have primarily been analysed as independent processes within the boundaries of individual brains. Here, we applied fMRI to record brain activity from both speakers and listeners during natural verbal communication. We used the speaker’s spatiotemporal brain activity to model listeners’ brain activity and found that the speaker’s activity is spatially and temporally coupled with the listener’s activity. This coupling vanishes when participants fail to communicate. Moreover, though on average the listener’s brain activity mirrors the speaker’s activity with a delay, we also find areas that exhibit predictive anticipatory responses. We connected the extent of neural coupling to a quantitative measure of story comprehension and find that the greater the anticipatory speaker–listener coupling, the greater the understanding. We argue that the observed alignment of production- and comprehension-based processes serves as a mechanism by which brains convey information.”

This confirms that in order to understand the story, the person imagines it in sensory detail, and thus synchronises with the story-teller, experiencing the emotional responses that the teller evokes as well. This is a very old understanding of course. When asked “Why do you speak to them in parables?” Jesus of Nazareth is said to have answered by quoting the Jewish prophet Isaiah, saying that his aim was that people needed to be led through stories so “they should perceive with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and turn for me to heal them.” (Christian Bible, Mathew, 13.15  More literally put in older translations, “so that those with eyes should see, those with ears should hear, and those with a heart turn to me and be healed.”)

This research and the examples above emphasise that to be successful storytelling needs to meet the following criteria:

• Establish rapport first (e.g. note the way people identified with Mkwaju in Tanzania).
• Tell stories with engaging sensory details, including emotion.
• Tell stories which reach a positive conclusion (e.g. the success of Tenu in Tanzania).
• Tell stories which make it clear what specific behaviour needs to happen and shows how it is possible.

In summary then, to really influence someone who has unhelpful ideas, use stories, attention to their emotional needs and respect for their own value of scepticism. However, in the end, like someone working with an addict, you need to be willing to let go and accept that they need to find their own time to get out. That’s hard, but there is no simpler way. To remember the key points here, Think of your conversation as creating a RAMP back to sanity.

• R – Rapport: Restate their feelings and values, Ratify areas of agreement, Value their scepticism.
• A – Assess: Assess their beliefs, and identify what cognitive biases they may operate with.
• M – Metaphorical stories and, with their permission,  correcting of Main Mistaken facts.
• P – Patience, Politeness, and be Prepared for the possibility that change may not happen.

This article is taken from a larger article on Cognitive Biases and NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming). Finally, it is useful to note that our own lives are themselves a story. May we live so we influence others positively with that story.

Bibliography

• Bolstad, R., 2005, Transforming Communication, Transformations, Auckland
• Grenny, J. Patterson, K., Maxfield, D., McMillan, R., and Switzler, A. 2013. Influencer: The New Science of Leading Change, McGraw-Hill, New York
• Singhal, A. & Rogers, E. (1999). Entertainment-Education: A Communication Strategy for Social Change. 10.4324/9781410607119.
• Sivelä, J., 2015, Kaiken takana ei ole salaliittoteoriaa [There is no conspiracy theory behind everything], Helsinki
• Stephens, G.J., Silbert, L.J. and Hasson, U. 2010. “Speaker–listener neural coupling underlies successful communication” in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, June 18, 2010