Heroes, Villains, and the Science of Narrative in Politics
Nieman Lab: In policy development, what are the biggest hurdles to building successful narratives?
Michael D Jones: Believing you have to communicate narratively is the biggest hurdle. For example, I just don’t think Democrats do it. Democrats are stuck in this Enlightenment reasoning kind of thing, thinking that if you take the facts to people about a particular policy it will be enough. They think that saying “This is what happens if you spend X amount of dollars on education” will get people to reason themselves to the correct conclusions. It’s this idea that you just present better information and you get better policy outcomes.
You can see this with climate change. You just keep saying over and over that science says climate change is real, that there are the potential consequences we can expect to see if we don’t address it. But when people look at the issue, they see a different story. They see uncertainty, they see a scientific community that doesn’t have consensus. That’s because the anti-climate forces have put together a better narrative, one that focuses on that uncertainty.
The biggest obstacle is believing that you have to communicate narratively to begin with, as opposed to just conveying scientific information to people and letting them fill in the blanks. You have to tell people a story.
NL: What’s important about the story-source or the storyteller in whether or not a narrative is successful?
MDJ: Well, what we know about that we mostly know outside of narrative. We have a lot of work to do regarding characters and narrators and what function they play, scientifically verifying those things. But what we do know is that sources matter in other areas. The more a source thinks like you, acts like you and looks like you, the more trusting you are, the more willing you are to accept the story you’re told.
But to be honest, as far as looking at it explicitly from a narrative angle, we’ve got a lot of work to do.
(Read the rest of Michael D. Jones’s description of his fascinating work here, on Nieman Lab’s Blog. Interview by, I believe, Andrea Pitzer.)
