15 The importance of story

Stories are more effective than ‘facts’ in changing minds

This is the sixteenth post in this series. You may want to read the Introduction titled The Myth of Scientific Uncertainty, and posts numbered 1-14 first.

The book, Houston, We Have a Narrative[1], by Randy Olson, subtitled, Why Science Needs Story, resonated with me. I needed help telling the story of my experiences in science to a lay audience. Olson contrasts the lifeless formalism of a technical paper with things people read by choice. A relevant story draws us in and keeps our attention.

If a relevant story helps convey a message, why do we scientists work so hard to avoid it in the papers we write for each other? Among the few bits of scientific writing advice I got was to not tell the experimental sequence chronologically. Perhaps that’s the reason we avoid a story. But the order of events isn’t a story. The story is in the novelty and significance of the work. We could start there. That’s what scientific journalists who write about science for New Scientist or the New York Times do.

But there is another reason that the story and the message go hand-in-hand. Just as scientific knowledge is composed of laws and explanations, I argue that knowledge in general is a combination of facts and the stories we associate with them. When baffled by a person’s stubborn attachment to a belief in the face of contrary evidence, we find that it’s the associated story the person can’t relinquish. If we want to change people’s minds, we must modify or replace the stories associated with their beliefs. And the only way to do that is with a story that is more compelling.

And speaking of beliefs, I don’t think it wise of scientists to suggest we must make an either/or choice between science and spirituality. Science is based on regularities or reproducible phenomena. But one’s personal experience of the transcendent is not available for manipulation any more than you can reproduce on demand, the shiver once experienced from a beautiful scene or a musical performance. Scientists who dismiss the experiences of others just because they do not have an explanation for them are guilty of their own version of fundamentalism.

Very few nonscientists get their information about research results from the scientists themselves. Most depend on the organizations, companies, and institutions whose charter is to tell us what is going on. Journalists and reporters covering the scientific world would ideally have as much understanding of how science is done as sports reporters have about the nuances of the game on the field and in the locker room.

This is often not the case, which leaves us with comments on scientific conclusions or technological advances without a back story. What science went on behind the latest drug development? Where was it done? Who was on the team that discovered/created it? What stimulated the creative breakthrough? How was it tested? I have a special eyeroll for the phrase “Scientists say…” But as we have said, bolstering scientific fact is not enough to change belief.

We have gathered our beliefs through stories shared among the groups of which we are members. People have an explanation, plausible to them, for the beliefs they cling to. For instance, “The earth has gone through cataclysmic climate changes since prehistoric times. Human activities did not cause them then and are too insignificant to cause them now.”

In our public media, there is a lot of on-screen debate. Competing opinions are easy to find, but the more interesting and informative stories are those behind the science. The story of the advent and evolution of the science of glaciology, as told so well in John Gertner’s[2] Ice at the End of the World, beautifully lays out the bases for its conclusions. It’s impossible to read this book without feeling alarm at the ice melt in Greenland and Antarctica and its relationship to the burning of fossil fuels.

In most areas of creativity, the products of inspiration are identified with the person who created them. It was sometimes that way for scientists, too. We have Newton’s Laws of Motion, Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, Maxwell’s Theorems of Electromagnetism, and so on. Personal attribution of a scientific breakthrough is now rarer.

Why aren’t names of the inventors of integrated circuits that have made modern computers and all “smart” gadgets possible part of our vocabulary? (Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce). Could we say who developed the method CRISPR by which we can edit genes? (Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier). These are culture-changing advances whose attributions are not at the tips of most tongues.

There are standouts we can name and picture in many areas of endeavor. But who are the contemporary scientists we look up to? Our scientist stars are rarely publicly celebrated. It isn’t because there are too few worthy of appreciation. There are dozens, scores, hundreds of individuals who are successfully prying open nature’s secrets, creating new tools, and making our lives more secure and comfortable. If not heroes, they are at least great role models. Let’s tell their stories, too.

Please stay connected and spread the word that there are some things we know for sure, and that we can logically show why that is so.

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[1] Olsen, Randy, Houston, We Have a Narrative: Why Science Needs Story, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2015.

[2] Gertner, Jon, The Ice at the End of the World, Random House, 2019.

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