Humans are wired for story

- [Instructor] Every marketer, politician and fundraiser is being told to be a storyteller. Is storytelling just the hot new thing? Absolutely not. Storytelling is the ancient necessary boring old thing. Let me explain. In a book called "Useful Fictions, Evolution, Anxiety and the Origins of Literature," the author Michael Austin makes the point that, "Every single human culture, invests resources into producing and consuming stories, and has done so since dawn of time." This suggests that there's an evolutionary advantage to storytelling. Think about it this way, calories were difficult to come by way back when. So primitive humans learned to track them down, they crave the fats proteins and carbs from sweet and rich foods. And while that's no longer evolutionarily advantageous to humans in modern times, there is a reason we like those foods. Okay. So what does this have to do with telling stories? Well, Austin points out that fictional stories can produce and neutralize anxiety. Why would we want to do this? Well, it's because if you think about it, your survival depends on anxiety. Imagine you're walking through a Savannah, and you hear a rustling in the grass, do you stay or do you run like a mad man shrieking in fear, right? The argument is that you should run every time, even though 99% of the time it's not a lion stalking you, but just the wind or maybe a squirrel making that noise. But if you don't run, if you don't behave based on a false positive response, then one time out of 100 you're in big trouble, right? Successful narratives introduced and then resolve our anxiety. For instance by teaching us that most of the time, rustling in the grass is just a little varmint and even when it's a lion, you can survive. Through this we learn how to solve our problems, and we internalize the important idea that challenges and fears we face are solvable. Another person who talks about this is Lisa Cron. I absolutely love this quote from her book "Wired for Story." "Stories are crucial to our evolution, more so than opposable thumbs. Opposable thumbs let us hang on, story told us what to hang on to." She says essentially the same thing as Michael Austin. Both of them are talking about fictional storytelling, whereas we're focused on journalistic or documentary storytelling, when we talk about data storytelling. Going back in time, thinking about the evolutionary imperative, many early stories were documentaries not fiction. Like when ancient man went out on a hunt, and they came back to the cave to report the results, he told stories, it was a compelling narrative and yes, it contained data. The story would explain what time the hunting party left, what direction they traveled, where they found their prey, how far they ran, how many arrows they fired, the number of buffalo that were seen along the way, et cetera. They didn't have a spreadsheet with this data, it was a story. A study in 2016 found that the most influential scientists, those whose research are cited more often by other scientists, are those that use narrative techniques in their research reports. Storytelling is a key component of successful communications of all kinds. Humans evolved to produce and consume stories as a survival mechanism. We need and expect stories. So when you're communicating, think like a storyteller, especially when you're communicating data, which is inherently not anxiety-producing and does not provide any emotion or evolutionary imperative. The data means nothing without context, without the story around it.