INTERVIEW
Storytelling Special
JONATHAN GOTTSCHALL
Story is behind every great attractions experience, but sometimes we forget just how powerful narrative can be. We spoke to literary scholar and author of The Storytelling Animal Jonathan Gottschall, who shared his views on the logic and science of storytelling and the business opportunities it can afford attractions great and small
Alice Davis, managing editor, Attractions Management
Can you explain what you’re talking about when you talk about the “science of storytelling”? People think storytelling belongs to the humanities, the world of art and culture. It’s not usually thought of as a field that can be studied scientifically, brought into the lab. That’s what a lot of my work has been about. There are all these questions about storytelling, but because we couldn’t figure out a way to look at them scientifically we really couldn’t make a huge amount of progress answering them.
Why do you think it took a long time before we approached storytelling from a scientific point of view? We have all these questions: What are stories for? What effects do stories have on us? How do we react to stories emotionally, mentally, physiologically? And all we had – up until recently – was armchair speculation. Yet a lot of these questions are just basic lab questions and basic psychology questions. It’s a direct application of basic psychology
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methods, and not really all that radical, but there’s been resistance to doing scientific work in the humanities in general and in storytelling in particular. There’s a sense that stories must be protected from science because they’re people are afraid of losing that sense of mysticism and wonder, and if you explain the magic you’ll end up explaining it away – and I think that’s kind of crazy.
Can you talk us through some potential applications of storytelling science? There’s things stories can do that other forms of messaging can’t do. Stories are really good at getting attention. Attention spans are all over the place these days, but stories are the one thing that can reliably still the wandering and restless mind. You can pay attention to a story for hours on end – nothing else can do that. It’s emotional, and people make decisions on the basis of emotion, not on
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Jonathon Gottschall, distinguished research fellow at Washington and Jefferson College, is author of The Storytelling Animal
the basis of logic. Because it’s emotional, it’s persuasive, so you lose yourself when you go into story world. People get really open-minded, or a meaner way to say it is they get kind of gullible. They drop their scepticism and cynicism and let the story and the message wash over them. The information in a story is sticky,
it’s more memorable. Stories have been used since time immemorial as a way of conveying information to people, and that’s more memorable than just throwing facts at them. So there’s a bunch of things like that which are really important to communication in many different fields but particularly in business fields. There’s a number of ways that a story can’t be equalled by other forms of communication.
AM 4 2014 ©Cybertrek 2014
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