story-world

Simply telling someone a story in which they can see something of themselves can be enough to create a powerfully rewarding moment of identification, and that identification can lead to persuasion.

When we write our values, we design our heroic character in our story-world: Who is this person? What do they stand for? What do they stand against? What are their obstacles? What is the happy ending that they’re relentlessly pursuing? The rest of our story-world flows from here.

Stories are tribal propaganda. They control their group, manipulating its members into behaving in ways that benefit it. And it works. A recent study of eighteen hunter-gatherer tribes found almost eighty per cent of their stories contained lessons in how they should behave in their dealings with other people. The groups with the greater proportion

In his paper ‘The Psychology of Curiosity’, Loewenstein breaks down four ways of involuntarily inducing curiosity in humans: (1) the ‘posing of a question or presentation of a puzzle’; (2) ‘exposure to a sequence of events with an anticipated but unknown resolution’; (3) ‘the violation of expectations that triggers a search for an explanation’; (4)

We can't simply toss aside our flawed ideas as if they're a pair of badly fitting trousers. It takes overwhelming evidence to convince us that 'reality' is wrong.

When we finally realise something's up, breaking these beliefs apart means breaking ourselves apart. And that's precisely what happens in many of our most successful stories.

Will Storr, Th

…shaped narratives typically focus on the struggles of protagonist, are almost always grounded in some implicit or explicit moral conflict, and ultimately lead not just to an account of what happened but also to an expression of what it all meant. Shaped stories are meaning-making tools and they can exert awesome sway, not just over individual