Fritz Breithaupt
Subject: Why We Crave Stories
Bio: Humanities Scholar and Cognitive Scientist at UPenn, Author of The Narrative Brain: The Stories Our Neurons Tell
Transcript:
Larry Bernstein:
Welcome to What Happens Next. My name is Larry Bernstein. What Happens Next is a podcast that covers economics, politics, and history. Today’s episode is Why We Crave Stories.
This podcast was taped at a conference where I hosted several Penn Professors on various topics.
The audience included my friends who will join me in asking questions.
Fritz Breithaupt is the speaker, and he is a humanities scholar as well as a cognitive scientist at UPenn where he is studying the relationship between narratives and empathy. Fritz is the author of a new book entitled The Narrative Brain: The Stories Our Neurons Tell.
I want Fritz to talk about how we experience fictional stories in our daydreams to achieve personal growth.
Fritz, can you please begin with six minutes of opening remarks.
Fritz Breithaupt:
While you are listening to me you might drift away and find yourself in a different world. That is normal. I’m a professor I know that 50% of the time you will be somewhere else, and that’s a good thing because that ability lifts us across space to have co-experiences with other people.
Our mobility of consciousness, this mind wandering, fantasizing, is good. We share experiences. When one of us suffers or goes through something amazing, we can tell it to other people. And then retrospectively, our brain goes through the similar experience that we can learn from. That is very good for us that by means of storytelling we share an experience. If one of us does something bad and we talk about it, then others will not do it.
How do we study storytelling? In my lab, we tried telephone games. When we tell a story in a telephone game, a lot of weird things happen. It’s fantastic for academics because we can study the different versions. In my lab, we’ve played this with 20,000 people in different groups to see on a large scale what remains the same and what changes. Until now, the standard of research was there’s one clear thing that stays the same. It’s causality. Why someone did something. But when we redid these studies we noticed other patterns.
One of my favorite stories is someone finding a spider in their office and walking the spider outside. In the original story, that person tells the delicate details; how they caught the spider and used a box, carried it, let it out in the yard, but then in the telephone game it disappears. It’s not in the box; it’s not on the ground. This was the original story. We sent that through some retelling chains, and after three rounds of retelling, the story was as follows. I found a spider in my office. At first, I didn’t like it, but now we’re friends. The spider stuck around.
That is the whole story. It became much shorter. The causality changed. It’s not completely illogical, but the rescue operation that was so complicated before became just a friendship story. And what this indicates is what matters in these stories is not necessarily how it went, what the problem is, but the good outcome. A happy ending that stayed the same. These retellings the anchor of the stories is emotion, typically at the end, the rewarding emotion. We believe that when people remember a story they encode it by this core emotion that ends the story, in this case, the happy ending with the spider.
When they tell it to someone else, they start with that happiness, that emotion, and weave a story that somehow connects with that, but also invents new elements. The overall theory of this narrative thinking that I propose is that we are excited to get into story because there’s this promise of the reward. We have evolved to like these things because they give us rewarding emotion. There’s the triumph of the superhero, but it’s also sometimes the comeuppance, the punishment of the bad guys that you will find in every German fairy tale.
Larry Bernstein:
I’m interested in the art of storytelling. I practice it and I work the story. And one thing that I’ve noticed in the craft is the desire for the audience to take on the role of the lead character in the story. When I tell my stories, often I am the lead character in the story.
Fritz Breithaupt:
You don’t choose the sidekicks?
Larry Bernstein:
Invariably, it’s always me. I noticed that the audience rarely wants the lead character to do well. I’m going down and my audience loves that. They root me the whole way down. And sometimes there’s a moral at the end of the story not like Seinfeld. Tell us about why the storyteller tries to make the listener be the main character, and then why incorporate a moral lesson?
Fritz Breithaupt:
We love this feeling of being in the middle of the story where we don’t yet know what’s coming. When we jump on a character, we can choose the bad guy and try it out. Stories invite us to follow a character and it’s one of the few places where we are allowed to take risks.
That’s different in the real world. You don’t want to jump in any Uber car that is driven by a big risk taker. But in the stories, that is different. William Flesch at Brandeis University said that more than 50% of stories end in punishment of bad guys.
Myths and religious tales, there’s a drive towards punishment. All of us do something bad. We’ve crossed the line, sometimes involuntarily, but we’ve done it. So, stories let us take that ride.
The comeuppance at the end is the relief point. The attraction of morality is that even if we jumped into the car with a bad Uber driver, maybe you had a car wreck, but you are out of it.
Larry Bernstein:
I noticed that if you tell a story and it’s not you that goes down but somebody else, there’s a sense of awkwardness with the listener. They don’t want to jump on someone who’s already downtrodden. But if it’s me that goes down, now they’re ready to laugh and enjoy that.
Fritz Breithaupt:
The first principle of stories here is the co-experience. We spend four to six hours a day involved in story thinking. Co-experience is key. So, if someone is going down and you don’t like that character, it’s in the story world, that’s boring, they get what they deserve, and you jump off the ship. But if it’s you going down, it’s much more exciting but also terrifying. The question then is, what can be your exit route? You mentioned one of them, which is laughter. Laughter is one of these rewarding emotions that lets you exit and jump off the ship, If you can laugh about it, you step outside of it. You can dissolve that terrible tension and can say, “I tried this out and it didn’t work.”
James White:
Many people believe that older men don’t read fiction. Why do you think that is?
Fritz Breithaupt:
Reading is down in America and the Western world. India is holding steady, maybe the biggest reading nation in the world. We have fewer male students in the colleges for the last 30 years. There’s lots of factors going into that. I wouldn’t blame the internet or cell phones. Young male students in high school and middle school can’t sit still, they have been selected out of the school, so they don’t develop good reading habits.
James White:
Most of my male friends read but almost exclusively nonfiction.
Fritz Breithaupt:
Maybe males don’t think it’s cool reading fiction. It doesn’t have this utilitarian dimension.
Hannah Bernstein:
Why is it so hard to tell a good story and how changeable are people’s innate storytelling abilities? We crave good stories. And even if males above 40 don’t read fiction, there’s still the Netflix movies. We want that story. We are good at selecting. Each of us has a bias of this is not a story for me. I don’t like that main character.
Fritz Breithaupt:
I advise Netflix on how to analyze their stories. I tell them for a story to work; you must see more than one path for how a story could go. This excitement of not knowing what’s happening, that suspense of being in between the versions, I call that multiversionality. That is key. And that is not well taught in writing schools because you don’t see that many manuscripts coming up.
Larry Bernstein:
in our audience today is Jeff Shell an old friend of mine who used to run movie studios, Universal, more recently Paramount. One of the tasks at the most senior levels is when to green light multimillion dollar projects. Tell us about the process of the story, how executives review them and the teamwork to develop a story, to incorporate emotion, moral standing, character development, et cetera.
Jeff Shell:
A famous Hollywood person was going to use AI to write the story. He had the concept. A month ago, he used six different AI LLMs, and he interacted with these chat bots over the course of a couple weeks and had them turn his concept into a script. At the end of it, he had six different scripts, and they were all crap. It’s very hard to write a professional story. It takes a lot of talent; that’s the key to any good movie or TV show is a good script.
You never had a good movie or TV show based on a bad script. You’ve had many bad movies based on good scripts, but it must start with a good script and a good story. And that’s why the storytelling is so critical. This is a very hard thing to do.
Larry, your skill at telling stories is a unique skill set, which is why we all like hearing stories. And we like seeing you go down because your stories are generally comedy and we know you and love you. So, we like seeing, just like Jerry Seinfeld goes through all of his problems. We know him now. So, we like seeing the comedy of it all. If it was a drama, we might not feel as good about your failing.
The process of a story becoming a movie is the most tedious, horrible rote process that you’ve ever seen. It’s not sexy. It’s not like a bunch of people sitting around a room saying, “Let’s green light this movie,” and then the person’s off to make the movie. There are many reasons to say no to making a movie. The only reason you say yes is because you must make a certain number of movies a year to get your return on capital.
The hardest part is the story. I only read nonfiction. And the reason why I would not read fiction is because I felt like I was wasting time. When I read nonfiction, I felt like I was learning something. And I don’t know if that’s somehow different between men and women.
I had no problem wasting time watching a show like Below Deck or The Lakers. But when I’m reading a novel, I’m just wasting my time. I had an epiphany a couple years ago which was that fiction is the only way to truly feel empathy. And as I was reading your book, the key word to storytelling is empathy because you can get sadness, the happy ending, which most people want. They want to see a bad guy get punished.
I started reading fiction again and I can’t believe I stopped for 20 years. The short answer at the end of this is it’s very, very hard to tell a good story, which is why good storytellers are so magical.
Fritz Breithaupt:
I know this from the people at Netflix also from my friends in the publishing industry, they cannot predict the success of a movie even when it’s already made. Even with their test audiences, they still fish in the dark. So, there is something very interesting there that the right moment for the right story, I agree about empathy. That’s how I got into the narrative brain. My books before that were on empathy.
Jeff Shell:
The original ending of Get Out had the main character going off to prison. At the end, the cop car comes up, he gets arrested goes to prison, and it was the lowest testing movie in the history of Blumhouse. And all they did was change the ending, his friend saves him and he gets home and then it became the highest testing. So, you never know with these movies what’s going to be a success. Nobody has any idea what’s going to be successful. You know what’s going to be bad, you just don’t know what’s going to be good.
David Wecker:
The worst literary theorists to me are reductionists. They’re Marxists. They’re structuralists. They take some structure and apply it to this incredible area of human creativity. I’d say most of the Bible tells you who you are and that’s discomforting. I find it hard, especially when you’re talking about a telephone game, it’s very limited.
Fritz Breithaupt:
I was trained as a humanity scholar. I studied with one of the most extreme reductionists. Then I retrained and became a professor in cognitive science. So now I’m between cognitive science, psychology and the humanities. These communities don’t talk to each other. So, in the moment I bring up the humanities’ ideas to the scientists, they feel like we can’t test this. And then when I bring the scientific data back to the humanities, they feel like you’ve sold out to the hard sciences.
My lab is 10 people from the sciences and 10 from the humanities. Every project, they must have people from both sides. People of humanities learn to ask question-driven research where they don’t philosophize or have someone super structure, and the scientists have to learn to listen and do some close readings and do not say, “We have to be a reductionist in the sciences. We have to want clear numbers on all things, but we have to look for evidence. I’m trying to negotiate exactly that.
Darren Schwartz:
I recently wrote a memoir, not published. It’s hard to get a memoir published if you’re nobody.
It took me five years. It was grueling, stuck to the facts.
I’m now almost done with a novel. Fiction feels completely free. It’s fast. I’m just making stuff up, which is amazing. How do you feel about the difference between writing, sticking to the facts, where you still want to put creativity into it versus being completely unleashed?
Fritz Breithaupt:
When people suddenly go into fiction writing from the nonfiction side, they often lap onto a story mode that we call the hero’s journey where you follow the life of a hero who has to overcome obstacles, who has self-doubt, wants to back out, but then usually finds a good mentor and then overcome the obstacle. That can be facing the dragon or a harsh work environment. That pattern psychologists have now measured has some therapeutic dimensions when people see themselves as a hero.
What I learned from my own research was, stories are emotion arcs. When you tell an academic story, a business story, for example, think about it as an episode that ends in some emotional outcome.
Larry Bernstein:
I want to go back to your opening remarks about the spider. You mentioned that in the initial story, there was a lot of detail. And then when you got to the final story with the telephone experience, the story narrowed dramatically. When you tell someone a joke and they try to repeat it to somebody else, what they most remember is the punchline.
Fritz Breithaupt:
Good storytellers know the punchline, and they hide it from the audience for a while, keep the suspense going so that the punchline can come as a surprise. Many people are not so good at that part. There’s one exception to this rule that stories get shorter, and that is when people tell meaningful episodes of their own life. We’ve done studies on that. We asked people to tell us a meaningful life episode. We asked them to come back and tell us the same story again. That was the one exception where they would not get shorter. The stories are approximately the same length, but the quality is better the second time, but they would reduce the emotions. The first time, there were raw emotions positive or negative, but in their second telling, it was often a better story woven together. People do cognitive editing. Meaningful memories are the exception. That’s where every normal person becomes a good storyteller, because these things matter to us.
Stan Goldfarb:
I’ve seen Death of a Salesman many times, Why do people go back to see plays, particularly tragedies like that? Why is it so popular? It sounded in the beginning like you were talking about the emotional satisfaction you get out of it.
Fritz Breithaupt:
Netflix has data that people go back to their favorite movie repeatedly. The best explanation that I have is that people like surprises and they already know what’s coming. It’s often called the paradox of surprise or paradox of suspense that we enjoy including sad outcomes, but also surprising outcomes the most when we already know what’s coming.
You’re in the moment, but you also know where this is going. That is the golden formula. They give you little hints about what’s coming. You could guess it, but you don’t. But then when you hear it a second time, you now pick up on what’s coming, but it’s not known yet on the ground there in the story itself. So that double play adds joy.
Larry Bernstein:
There are a lot of movies you never watch again. Jeff Shell when you’re buying a portfolio of movies are you able to evaluate if you think it has a future. Like the Sinking of the Bismarck, that one’s just not coming back?
Jeff Shell:
You’re not going to watch something that’s suspenseful 15 times. There’s nothing suspenseful about Death of a Salesman. You’re not on the edge of your seat each time you watch it trying to figure out what’s going to happen. There’s nothing that’s suspenseful about Friends either. Death of a Salesman is inspirational. It’s a journey that Willy Loman overcomes. I think you watch things that give you an emotion over again that you enjoy having. The movies that people watch over again tend to be comedies. I’ve seen Superbad 50 million times. You don’t tend to watch who done it mysteries again.
The TV shows that are watched are either comedies or soaps: Grey’s Anatomy, Friends or Seinfeld, something where you get to know and feel comfortable with those characters almost like they’re a member of your family and you like spending time with your family.
Now, on the popularity of Friends, people are talking about the death of Hollywood, how production’s going down, and there’s less and less TV shows being made, which is empirically true. The reason for this is the Netflix effect and this is what’s driving the popularity of Friends and other shows. When we grew up, there was no ability to go back and watch old shows unless you happen to be channel surfing, you came across a rerun or an old movie. These days if you’ve never seen Friends before and you’re 22 years old and you start watching Friends, it’s a new show.
It’s no different than a show that Netflix might have invested in this year So there is increasingly less need for so many new shows, partially because there’s a lot of international shows now, the quality of international shows has gone up.
Larry Bernstein:
I tried to persuade my 10-year-old son to watch the movie Rambo First Blood. He’s like, “Dad, is it black and white?” I said, “No, no, it’s not black and white.” He said, “Dad, I’ll give you five minutes and that’s it.” I’ll take the five-minute trial.
The movie starts and he’s completely engrossed not by dialogue but by action in First Blood. When the movie ended, I said, “What did you think? “ And he said, “If they had just let him buy a sandwich, people didn’t have to die.
Jeff Shell:
Good story. I love First Blood. Comedy is struggling for decades now. If you talk about the best comedies on TV that have multiple episodes, the only one from the last 10 years that has been successful is Schitt’s Creek, if you look at Friends, Seinfeld, Big Bang Theory, they’re all shows from more than 10 years ago. The reason for this is dramas are what Fritz describes in his book as suspense. You don’t know what happens next. You want to see the cliffhanger at the end of the Game of Thrones episode. With comedies you must live with the characters to find them funny. Seinfeld didn’t do well in its first year. The Office didn’t do well in its first year. And in the age of streaming, you can’t like a comedy after five minutes. You just don’t know the characters enough. So, one of the big things happening in entertainment is a crisis where there are no new comedies in TV that are working.
Jeff Strong:
Why is it that standup comedy seems to be so popular right now?
Jeff Shell:
Standup’s working great. TikTok is comedy. Instagram is comedy. People want to laugh. It’s just the shows that we grew up on, which are characters creating comedy. Maybe part of the reason is that you’re getting the comedy in standup on Instagram or TikTok. You don’t have to get it in shows anymore.
Bryan Verona:
In the telephone game, can you predict what the original story is?
Fritz Breithaupt:
You could do it with an AI story. If you have the reduced version, which is like 10% or 20% of the original story, you can go back to the original somewhat. With human stories, there’s no way of doing that, because each human re-teller brings so much of his or her personality into it. Perspective jumps. When we collect stories from people, everyday stories, fiction, whatever, makeup stories, they have three or four characters in it. and we often give, lots of re-tellers the same story, tend to focus on one perspective, but it can be a different one for each one.
We had a story of an old neighbor who is lonely because his wife cares for their grandchild elsewhere. He comes to his neighbors whenever they are doing yard work and wants to talk about politics. They don’t share his political opinion, so they need to push him away. Complicated story. We give that story to a couple of people, and it works as a story. Each re-teller focuses on a different person. Some of them blame the neighbors, “Oh, they should talk to their neighbor.” Some of them focus on the wife of the old man. “She should really be there.” And others say, “No, she’s right to have left.”
Everyone takes a different perspective; there’s no way to reconstruct it. You can have likelihood paradigms. Humans are very creative. Each of us brings a lot into our stories and individualizes them in wonderful ways. That’s part of the interest in it. If we know how the story goes and would focus on the same character, it would be boring. There’s no need to tell it.
There is an interesting difference here between old movies and old books. During the pandemic, I read War and Peace again, which is fabulous.
What we see in movies is that the cuts are way too slow. The scenes are too long. It’s overdrawn on many levels. What we see, however, is that old movie plot lines are refilmed for modern audiences with good effects. Once we force them to watch it, they can get over that and then they love it, but a company like Netflix can’t get anyone to force them to watch for more than five minutes.
Larry Bernstein:
Talk about skepticism, the narrator, is he trustworthy or not? And as I mentioned in my storytelling, I’m always the lead character in the story. A lot of listeners have enormous skepticism about the narrator in my story, and they don’t really believe that at all.
Fritz Breithaupt:
Well, you are a good storyteller because everyone knows there is a possible different take on this.
Hugh Nickola:
I want to talk about stories in business. Larry’s an inspiration here. Putting a story in a business meeting. It doesn’t even need to be relevant necessarily to the subject, to recapture people’s attention or to set people at ease. Particularly if it’s a self-effacing story, that’s particularly useful. People have picked their roles in the meeting. Then the meeting doesn’t get what you need. And it’s not necessarily group think, it may simply be that they attach themselves to some idea, they have their own role and they envision it. How do you defeat that to make that meeting more productive?
Fritz Breithaupt:
I was in the role of being a dean at one point. I chair my department. It’s hard to shake people out of it. The one good thing in the university environment is that I deal with the same people. I can bring them into different environments and try to throw them into a different role. And if I kick someone a little bit and say, “Hey, can you propose this idea here?” They become the positive person and someone else becomes the naysayer.
Playfulness always gets you out of it. If people start to become storytellers, they have agency and suddenly say, “Hey, why don’t you try a different role?” That often works.
Larry Bernstein:
Thanks to Fritz for joining us.
If you missed our previous podcast, it was Returning Science Education to Medical Schools.
Our speaker was Stan Goldfarb who previously was the Dean at UPenn responsible for the medical school curriculum. Stan discussed how basic science like biostatistics has been stripped from medical education, and why we need to teach doctors to be scientists and not technicians.
You can find our previous episodes and transcripts on our website. Please follow us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
I am Larry Bernstein with the podcast What Happens Next.
Check out our previous episode, Returning Science Education to Medical Schools, here.
