Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
The Power of Storytelling in Shaping Who We Are and Our Beliefs
9 Plays20 days ago
In this episode I discuss the role of storytelling in shaping our beliefs and who we are in the world and the power to overcome it. Storytelling isn’t just how we entertain—it’s how we survive, connect, and make meaning. From an evolutionary standpoint, stories helped early humans bond in larger groups, transmit wisdom, and navigate danger. Neurologically, they activate empathy circuits, mirror sensory experiences, and even synchronize brainwaves between speaker and listener. But the real power of storytelling lies in its ability to shape belief and identity. Whether it’s a nation’s founding myth, a personal trauma narrative, or a viral conspiracy theory, stories determine how we see ourselves, others, and what we think is possible. And when people reclaim authorship of their own story—especially those who’ve been marginalized or silenced—it can restore agency, reshape mental health, and catalyze collective healing. Storytelling is not just reflection—it's revolution.
Recommended
Transcript
The Influence of Storytelling
00:00:00
Tony Montgomery
Today we're going to talk about storytelling and how that shapes our beliefs and the the power that the narrator has on um on our perceptions, our beliefs, and and the the systems that we develop.
00:00:14
Tony Montgomery
And it really stems back from from an evolutionary perspective of why storytelling has such a huge impact on the way we see the world, the way we see ourselves in the world.
00:00:25
Tony Montgomery
And one of the one of the biggest things is that this idea that we are um you know one of the only um species that can that can tell story that can convey message through through language and and storytelling and it really highlights our capacity to create and and share narratives as a defining feature um and across every culture and and era people have told stories myths legends histories and you know all all the narratives um throughout from from novels to to books to to music and
00:01:03
Tony Montgomery
they use this as a way to make sense of the world and the the narratives um that we create that we tell were more than just entertainment value they were um the ability to pass on traditions morals um things that can can shape the way we build our our culture and our society and it carries values and it can explain the unknown through ah religion and it creates shared beliefs that that can bond communities And anthropologists have found evidence of storytelling in the oldest human societies indicating that telling him these tells is is a universal
Evolutionary Role of Narratives
00:01:40
Tony Montgomery
experience. It's a human fundamental human phenomena that encapsulates all of us, right? from
00:01:48
Tony Montgomery
From evolutionary perspectives, where where a our ability to weave these narratives may have um given us a survival edge. allows us to create larger social groups and and communicate and transmit information and enforce norms and um cement group identity beyond what simple facts or commands could achieve.
00:02:10
Tony Montgomery
And a compelling story can can package complex ideas into memorable, emotional, resonant forms, making them easier to understand and recall. um Psychologists note that people remember information presented as a story far more effectively than information presented as isolated facts.
00:02:30
Tony Montgomery
um with one analysis going over this idea that you can get about 20 times more likely to remember if it's part of a narrative instead of just these individual facts, which we've seen throughout like memory research and and these people that are memory athletes and and their ability to um store memory is very contextualized with these palaces that they create that allow them to put things in certain places and create the story, this arc, so that they're able to recall better.
00:03:01
Tony Montgomery
and they they engage um a lot of our circuitry within our brain, social and emotional, and it allows listeners to identify with with characters, scenarios, and modern neuroscience also confirms that when we hear well-told story, you know our brains exhibit patterns as if we're experiencing the events ourselves, attuning us to the storyteller's message, which is where we can get this group think mentality and it just it really does this ability to tell the story syncs up our minds and um and allows us to to kind of couple together and marry each other, um which is a phenomenon that has been shown within the neuroscience.
00:03:47
Tony Montgomery
From evolutionary standpoint, it most likely emerged as a crucial adaptation of like social animals living in complex groups. um British anthropologist Robin Dunbar He created this idea of the social brain hypothesis, has argued that language and storytelling functioned as a form of of social grooming in early human communities, whereas primates solidify bonds by physical grooming.
00:04:14
Tony Montgomery
Humans use speech and narrative to achieve similar bonding effects with many individuals. So telling stories around the ah campfire um would release these endorphins and foster this group cohesion release of neurotransmitters. And that would create this non-physical bonding experience.
00:04:33
Tony Montgomery
So as as fire came about, there was no longer a need to... um immediately go to go to sleep as the as the sun went down. So we had all these
Storytelling and Cultural Transmission
00:04:44
Tony Montgomery
extra hours of of time. And um but what we found is that that that time that we had, we spent communicating, telling stories, um talking about the day or at that That is something that evolutionarily has been around and been an adaptive strategy for us for survival and and for for this bonding mechanism.
00:05:05
Tony Montgomery
And it's provided an efficient means to transmit knowledge and and cultural norms essential for that survival. Early humans faced many dangers and challenges of finding food, avoiding predators, dealing with intergroup conflict, and concrete lessons learned by one person could be passed to others through through this narrative experience.
00:05:26
Tony Montgomery
And the ability to create a well-crafted story um of a successful haunt, a dangerous encounter um could teach the whole group what to do and what not to do in those similar situations without you know us having to learn through trial and error on our own.
00:05:46
Tony Montgomery
And cognitive scientist Steven Pinker noted the apparent paradox that humans spend so much time in imaginary worlds of stories, yet rather than being a ah waste, this tendency has an adaptive value, kind of like we talked about when Burkhart was on about Dungeons and Dragons and when when Dr. Olmos was on talking about um anime, right? these These stories become very ah adaptive, these imaginary worlds.
00:06:13
Tony Montgomery
and um And they do this by acts of, it acts as ah as a simulation um for for space and and for learning.
00:06:24
Tony Montgomery
And we see this within dreams as well. A lot of the dream research shows that we have this reduction in inhibition in certain brain areas like the default mode network and the amygdala and that allows us to safely um go through these dreams and and categorize things in a way that is not inhibited by certain brain areas that we get inhibited by um when we're when we're not asleep or when we're not in these creative scenarios. it allows us to
00:06:59
Tony Montgomery
um M.D.: the world and create safety in a world. Matt M.D.: Through these weird complex imaginary thought process that that allows us to carry out and and fundamentally become.
00:07:12
Tony Montgomery
um Nielsen- Less engrossed with with negative stimuli throughout the day and psychologists Keith Oatley and and Raymond Marr have likened fiction to a flight simulator for life engaging with narratives helps people practice understanding others intentions and
Empathy and Engagement
00:07:30
Tony Montgomery
emotions. Kevin Nielsen- Which translates into better real world social abilities and this is played out within the research where they've.
00:07:36
Tony Montgomery
um brought in people and from different backgrounds different ideological lean-ins politically and without really expressing um which way they were leaning they just had them have conversations ask them questions and what they found within the research is that the the more you get to know the person the more you realize that we have we have far more in common than we have a part um But the fact that we go in there with these with these ideologues that allow us to differentiate between us and them creates this, the story that we told ourselves creates this identity to where we can't put ourselves in this other person's shoes. And you can see how that can become a problem. But when we're not enveloped in the story that we've told ourselves in these beliefs, then we realize and we have a better understanding and we have more empathy towards the other person.
00:08:26
Tony Montgomery
And it finds that um research also shows that individuals who read a lot of fiction tend to have stronger empathy and social cognition skills, but it's not really clear. They can't parse out within the research um whether or not reading stories makes people more empathic or if empathic people consume more stories. um So that's always one of those you know chicken or the egg type scenarios. But as as the group size increase in human evolution,
00:08:55
Tony Montgomery
maintaining this coherence and cooperation of ah being able to share these narratives became crucially vital for expansion and growth and and um liveliness.
00:09:07
Tony Montgomery
So the idea that historian Yuval Harari kind of argues within his book, Homo sapiens, is that there's this cognitive revolution and it was marked by the emergence of ah fictive language, the ability to talk about things that are not immediately present or even real.
00:09:28
Tony Montgomery
Gods, nations, myths, which enable large-scale cooperation among strangers who believe the same stories. ah You can think about religious perspectives. You can think about um the myth that he was saying, and and his claims are are popularized. They do align with um anthropological evidence that a mythical storytelling and even religious rituals appeared as humans formed larger communities. And um what's really cool about that is that there's there is research um that certain brain regions are associated with spiritual or religious experiences. So um as we were evolving, our brain had this spot in it and associated spots that gave us the spiritual and religious experience, almost as if um we evolved to have this understanding that we need something beyond us
00:10:28
Tony Montgomery
And we need it to be hardwired in our brain in order for us to succeed in a social environment. And that brain area is the temporal parietal junction or TPJ for short.
00:10:42
Tony Montgomery
And it's particularly in the right hemisphere. And researchers have dubbed that area the God spot. And some of the research that kind of... builds off of that is there's this research that was done by Michael Persinger and they use the device that generated weak magnetic fields targeting the temporal lobes and some participants reported sense in a presence of feeling watched or have an intentional or intense spiritual experiences and they suggested that stimulation of the right temporal lobe could induce sense presence experiences similar to those reported during religious or or mystical experiences and they've seen very similar things with people that have temporal lobe epilepsy
00:11:29
Tony Montgomery
um They report religious or spiritual experiences during seizures. And then we also have the default mode network. The posterior cingulate cortex, part of that default mode network is implicated in self-referential thought.
00:11:43
Tony Montgomery
um Psychedelics reduce activity in this area and are associated with like ego dissolution, um which is another hallmark of mystical experiences. So these things are hardwired in us um through evolution um and evolution.
00:12:00
Tony Montgomery
it goes to show that that we need these things in our life and we've evolved those things.
Universal Story Patterns
00:12:06
Tony Montgomery
There's selection processes that make them very important, but we also know that they can create a lot of divide as well.
00:12:14
Tony Montgomery
And I don't think that was something that was really problematic back then, but it is more maladaptive now and in today's society. um But in the in the Neolithic period, there was um as the as the settlements grew, archaeologists see signs of communal ritual structures, and they suggest that this reflects a shift to group level storytelling and um Dr. Daniel Doctrinal myths that reinforce social cohesion and ah bigger populations.
00:12:42
Tony Montgomery
One key evolutionary benefit of storytelling is its role in moral and normative education. um Before written laws or scientific explanations, early humans encoded their ethics and and understanding of nature and and stories.
00:12:56
Tony Montgomery
um and Joseph Campbell um portrays this really well in in his books, the myth of a thousand faces or something along. He has ah has a bunch of books that go into these these mythical experiences and and the impact they have and and what he found through analyzing these experiences mythical experiences is that there's a lot of universal aspects and themes involved in them.
00:13:29
Tony Montgomery
And he created this concept of the hero's journey, which outlines a ah common narrative that we see in books and and movies today. And when these narratives are not met, um these books and these movies feel very, very clunky and they and they don't do well.
00:13:46
Tony Montgomery
And the reason for that is because um these These arcs, these these heroes journey myths are something that is is fundamentally in our brains and in stored.
Storytelling and Memory
00:13:58
Tony Montgomery
And um that's the way we see the world. So when things are portrayed in that way, it resonates with us and it makes us feel more emotions connected to that. And this this arc um that he talks about in all books, myths, movies, um is there the there's the departure.
00:14:15
Tony Montgomery
there's the initiation and then there's the return. And, um, you can think of that as the book of the, um, the parable son and the departure, the what goes on and then his return,
00:14:30
Tony Montgomery
um And that transcends ah a bunch of religious texts and a bunch of um movies and he he believed these reoccurring patterns reflect um archetypal.
00:14:41
Tony Montgomery
challenges of human life and serve to guide individuals through personal growth and understanding of their place in society. And he described these four functions of myth and human culture as the the mystical um which is instilling a sense of awe before the universe, the cosmological.
00:14:57
Tony Montgomery
Nielsen- Explaining the shape of the world, the sociological support and social order and values and the psychological guiding individuals through life stages. So these traditional stories help people experience Kevin Nielsen- The sacred comprehend nature's mysteries, learn the communities rules and navigate the journey from childhood to elderhood and those functions illustrate how deeply storytelling. um was interwoven into our belief systems in early societies.
00:15:25
Tony Montgomery
And beyond the bonding and the teaching, deception and imagination and storytelling ah may have created an arms race and in human cognition um Enrico Cohen and in 2019 proposed that as language enabled people to tell both truthful accounts and convincing lies, there was evolutionary pressure to become smarter listeners and storytellers.
00:15:47
Tony Montgomery
So those who were better at spot and false stories and or inconsistencies would avoid being misled um and they would gain a advantage and in survival. While those who were better storytellers could influence others and garner trust,
00:16:00
Tony Montgomery
or status, which is why we're so drawn to these charis charismatic leaders um that may not have the best leadership principles, but their charisma draws us in and they can influence us and they can build trust And the the runaway selection for storytelling intelligence could have driven the expansion of our brain's capacity for narrative, abstract thought, and skepticism. And Cohen points out the double-edged nature of storytelling. It has the power to convey truth or or to deceive, to build community, or to manipulate.
00:16:32
Tony Montgomery
And we see this in all shapes and sizes throughout the world now and this human intelligence um may have partly evolved to manage this balance.
00:16:45
Tony Montgomery
It lets us reap the benefits of of shared narratives without falling prey to harmful fictions. um The very fact that we become so immersed in stories suggests natural selection favored that immersion for social learning and cohesion, but also needed to calibrate it so that we don't lose track of reality and entirely. And then from a neurobiological and cognitive perspective, we want to always think about like why, why are stories so sticky in the human mind and we can think about um beyond stories, music and and poetry, and some of the first stories and um Homer's Odyssey and and the Iliad.
00:17:26
Tony Montgomery
These were done in poetic um prose. They were told by bards and they were told through music and poem. And the reason that that transcended and the reason that stuck in time and get being passed on is because with, with,
00:17:41
Tony Montgomery
the music with the way it's put into play with the way that it is um drawn out, right? Those things make it very sticky for us to remember and understand.
00:17:53
Tony Montgomery
There's been plenty of times where, you know, I haven't heard a song in ah decade and then all of a sudden comes on the radio and I still remember every single word because there's something about that music that creates emotion, that creates memory, and that makes it very sticky within our brains, even though it's not something that maybe we can recall right then and there um without that music to to kind of remind us.
00:18:15
Tony Montgomery
And modern neuroscience and cognitive psychology have begun to unravel how our brains process these narratives. And it reveals multiple systems that make us natural storytellers and story listeners at the broadest level.
00:18:28
Tony Montgomery
There appear to be dedicated networks in the brain for making sense of narratives. For example, brain imaging studies show that listening to or reading the story engage engages a widespread set of regions um beyond just language areas, including those involved in sensory perception, emotion,
00:18:45
Tony Montgomery
and theory of mind, which is the ability to think about others thoughts. So when people hear descriptive narrative, their sensory and motor cortices can activate and patterns correspond into the content of the story, which we touched on in the beginning of this episode.
00:19:00
Tony Montgomery
So in one study, volunteers listen to a story while in an fMRI scanner. and the story described a character grasping on object or running parts of the listener's motor cortex involved in hand or leg movement lit up and as if they were experiencing the actions vicariously.
00:19:17
Tony Montgomery
So this neural mirror and helps explain why a well-touched story can um make us flinch at a hero's pain or feel warm at a character's story. Our brains simulate the events of the narrative internally. just like a sad movie will make us cry more so than than we think we we would naturally do. um And then particularly striking neurological finding is this idea of a synchronization between a speaker and a listener's brain during storytelling.
00:19:45
Tony Montgomery
So in Princeton, There was an experiment where a woman told an unrehearsed personal story while in an fMRI scanner, and then many volunteers listened to ah recording of that story in the scanner. The researchers led by Yuri Hassan found that the listener's brain activity closely matched the speaker's brain activity with a slight delay.
00:20:07
Tony Montgomery
When the storyteller's frontal cortex showed a spike, the listener's frontal cortices showed a similar spike moments later. um This phenomenon was dubbed neurocoupling. And with this idea of neurocoupling, it always brings about this um debate of free will versus determinism. Do we have free will?
00:20:26
Tony Montgomery
um And as you can see here, that there's things that show that there might not be as much free will. um as we think, that there's a lot of determinism in the things that we do in the actions that we we take.
00:20:40
Tony Montgomery
um So the the neurocoupling suggests that effective storytelling um can literally align the mental state of the audience with that of the storyteller. So notably, if if listeners do not understand the story,
00:20:53
Tony Montgomery
ah like if it was done in a foreign language, that brain coupling disappears. So the study elegantly demonstrated communication in the brain, um success and transmit in the story can be measured as the alignment of neural patterns between people.
00:21:07
Tony Montgomery
Such coupling underlies the powerful sense of connection we feel when engrossed in a narrative is as if our minds are temporarily running this the same program. And then the Another key brain system at work is the theory of mind network, which involves areas like the medial prefrontal cortex, and the TPJ again, which we talked about as that maybe that God area of the brain.
00:21:32
Tony Montgomery
And this network activates when we think about the intentions, beliefs or emotions of others, and it comes online strongly during story comprehension. So even by age of four or five, children develop the ability to follow characters, mental states and and stories which parallels their development of theory of mind in reality.
00:21:50
Tony Montgomery
So narratives essentially exercise this capacity. um When we follow a plot, we are constantly attributing thoughts and motivations to the characters, um predicting what might happen next, feel empathy or surprise based on those attributions.
00:22:05
Tony Montgomery
um Empathy is a cornerstone of of narrative engagement, and research shows that people with higher empathy scores become more easily transported into fictional stories and feel the emotions of the characters more intensely.
00:22:18
Tony Montgomery
um This empathic engagement is not just a passive side effect. It appears to be one mechanism by which stories can change your attitudes. If a narrative causes us to identify with someone very different from ourselves, it can open up the to their perspective in a way dry facts just won't do.
00:22:38
Tony Montgomery
And then memory and cognition are also optimized for narrative structure. Human memory is um not like a computer database of facts. We talked about memory in some of the mental health um disorder podcasts that we've done.
00:22:52
Tony Montgomery
And what we do is we we encode experiences and in chunks um through this prediction error machine that often take the story form. So there's usually a beginning, a middle and end causes and effects.
00:23:06
Tony Montgomery
And the psychologist Frederick Bartlett in 1930 showed that when people are asked to recall unfamiliar information like a folktale from another culture, they unconsciously reshape it into a form that fits their own familiar narratives or or schemas, which is probably why we have this transcendence of um religious texts or mythologies that have so much carryover into them is that we just reshape it to fit our environment, our societal norms and our our memory ah of ways that we can do that.
00:23:38
Tony Montgomery
So one of the one experiment, um British participants read a Native American legend, The War of the Ghosts, and later retold it. And their retellings omitted or changed details that didn't make sense to them. Instead, they inserted more familiar plot elements. Effectively, they remembered their version of the story that felt coherent to them, um which is why nowadays um eyewitness testimony is something that just doesn't really hold up in in court anymore because we know that there's so many incongruencies unconsciously and in memory and memory formation.
00:24:12
Tony Montgomery
This is This indicates that like we remember the gist of the stories and the meaning we derived rather than the verbatim details and that we only um that we rely on the schema, the mental frameworks to reconstruct a story in memory.
00:24:30
Tony Montgomery
Again, goes back to these um archetypal myths or the collective unconscious that Carl Jung talks about. And these these narratives provide and an excellent schema, a logical consequence of events with causal links. This is why storytelling helps learning because stories are easier to to remember, and which is why um a lot of our moral landscape is built in religious story um as opposed to just arbitrary facts that that are laid out because that's going to create more buy-in, that's going to create more emotional attachment to those and therefore we're more likely to to follow them out.
00:25:09
Tony Montgomery
So there's organizational psychologists, Peg Neuhauser, found that lessons delivered through story are recalled more accurately and for far longer than the same points delivered through facts and figures and Jerome Bruner um estimated that we're um able to remember 20 times through story than standalone fact.
00:25:33
Tony Montgomery
And the reason the story sticks in memory relates to how they engaged multiple cognitive faculties, a list of Bullet points might only engage our language process and and work in memory, but a story with imagery and emotion engages visual imagination, auditory process.
00:25:51
Tony Montgomery
so this we So we know that memories are stored um in multiple areas of the brain through this process, um that the hippocampus is definitely the main area for memory formation. But without these other things, those memories become dull, become blunted.
00:26:10
Tony Montgomery
And that's why we see these effects with mental health disorders, such as depression. We see that these memory areas that create these vibrant emotional experiences, they become dull, they become less active um with people that suffer from those mental health disorders, which is why their memories are more negatively valence.
00:26:29
Tony Montgomery
So even if there was positive things in their life, they're going to remember them as as negative because these brain areas aren't interacting um like like we want them to. And this this rich encoding creates many pathways to recall information later.
00:26:44
Tony Montgomery
And stories often encapsulate a cause and effect, which our brains are adapt at encoding as it helps us predict and navigate the world. So in evolutionary terms, remembering the story about which berries made someone sick is far more useful than remembering a random list of plant names. So our memory prioritizes narrative event-based information.
Perception vs. Facts
00:27:05
Tony Montgomery
um And then from a neurochemical perspective, storytelling can trigger the release of of hormones and and neurotransmitters that enhance attention and and empathy. Researchers have found that a tense, dramatic narrative can increase cortisol and that can heighten focus on on what's happening. And a move-in character-driven narrative can elevate oxytocin, which promotes feelings of connection and empathy empathy towards the characters.
00:27:29
Tony Montgomery
um And that's why we find ourselves constantly rooting for single individuals in stories, whether they're the bad guy or the good guy, because that connection um allows us to drive toward them and cheer for them.
00:27:43
Tony Montgomery
And then these neurochemical responses mean that a listener in the grip of a good story is literally under the influence of of brain chemicals that make them more receptive to the narrative and the ideas it contains. And once transported into a story, people tend to suspend some of their critical faculty, not in a pathological way, but in a willing acceptance of narrative premise.
00:28:06
Tony Montgomery
um We sometimes call this suspension of of disbelief. So in fact, um experiments confirm that when information is labeled as fiction, people let their guard down and engage with less analytically, potentially allowing the story to slip past rational resistance. That's why in these fantasy movies or in these action movies where things just don't make sense, we go into them with this understanding.
00:28:30
Tony Montgomery
that they're not going to make sense so that we don't necessarily have to make it align with the real world that we're in. And that allows us to enjoy these movies. Um, one study showed that labeling a passage fiction led participants to be less critical and more accepting of its contents.
00:28:45
Tony Montgomery
Whereas labeling the same passage fact made them scrutinize it more. So this again, points to distinct cognitive mindsets, a a narrative mode where we absorb meaning holistically and an analytical mode where we parse arguments,
00:29:00
Tony Montgomery
both have their place, but the the narrative mode is is more primal and emotionally potent. And then how does this relate to belief and and perception?
00:29:11
Tony Montgomery
um Stories do not merely just reflect our beliefs, they actively begin to shape them. And a compelling narrative or narrator can alter what we consider true, important, or morally right.
00:29:22
Tony Montgomery
um And that comes down to this idea of narrative persuasion and and transportation. One of the most research mechanism of story influence is called narrative transportation.
00:29:33
Tony Montgomery
ah The immersive mental state of of being lost in a story. When people are transported by a narrative, they become less aware of their surroundings and more emotionally invested in the plot and characters.
00:29:44
Tony Montgomery
Melanie Green and and Timothy Brock, who developed the transportation theory, found that more transported people are, the more the story can change their beliefs in line with the with the narrative.
00:29:55
Tony Montgomery
Essentially, a ah well-told story draws you in and subtly opens you up to accept the storyteller's underlying message. um So an audience can deeply absorb a fictional drama about climate change, may come away with stronger environmental beliefs, even if they started out skeptical.
00:30:16
Tony Montgomery
a documentary that came out, I forget the name of it, a little while ago that was around vegan and veganism with athletes. And i think Arnold Schwarzenegger was in it and they had all these famous people in it. And that really shaped um that narrative.
00:30:34
Tony Montgomery
And we saw that within the timeframe of that movie coming out, um a lot more people ah were trying vegan diets, were trying vegan to to do that. And we see it's like this social contagion of good storytelling.
00:30:50
Tony Montgomery
and we see that within the the political realm. We see that within um everyday life. you can You can put yourself in those situations and see that that that comes about. And then Melanie Green's studies showed that familiarity and identification increase transportation. If the story world ah or characters resonate with the audience experiences, they find it more realistic and become more immersed.
00:31:13
Tony Montgomery
So once transported, the usual tendency to counter-argue or critically evaluate is is reduced. Again, this gets into this whole um capture of ideology and and beliefs and that we're always going to look for the answers that fit our narrative and fit our belief system. And if the storyteller is um very good at doing that, they're going to be able to capture us to where we no longer question the things that we hear. um And I'm sure that sounds familiar for for a lot of you out there listening.
00:31:46
Tony Montgomery
So in one study, participants exposed to a narrative advertisement responded more positively than those given a purely factual ad, indicating that they were persuaded through the story rather than the logical considerations of product features.
00:32:00
Tony Montgomery
which is why you see when these pharmaceutical companies put out these commercials, um they are you're inundated with usually vibrant people, happy people making their way through life with their family.
00:32:13
Tony Montgomery
And you're constantly transported this to this idea that these pharmaceutical drugs are going to make your life better. And while you're watching that, while you're being captured by that, they hit you with the 80,000 side effects that come along with it.
00:32:26
Tony Montgomery
But you typically remember the joy and the um laughter and the emotional connection to the commercial. um as opposed to the the side effects. I think it loses a little bit of its value um when the side effects last longer than the commercial does that they they need to find a way to um either speed it up or or cliff notes it um to get the full effect.
00:32:52
Tony Montgomery
So there's ah there's a labeling message as a story. Fiction made people more accepting of its contents compared to labeling it as an argumentative essay going back to Green's research.
00:33:05
Tony Montgomery
and They concluded that people accept ideas more readily when their minds are in story mode as opposed to an analytical mode. And this has huge implications for advertising to to politics.
00:33:18
Tony Montgomery
um Those who craft the narrative often wield more influence than those who just present facts. um We see this within advertisement and and propagandists. Stories have the ability to change minds by appealing to emotions and and personal connection rather than direct argumentation.
00:33:37
Tony Montgomery
um Then we have this idea called framing and perspective, how a story is framed, um which elements of reality it highlights or emits can drastically alter perceptions.
00:33:48
Tony Montgomery
um So they found within research that this framing theory describes how journalists or storytellers select certain aspects of a situation to promote a particular interpretation, um which we see that a lot now within the um Ukraine Russia war and within the Israel Gaza war right depending on what side.
00:34:09
Tony Montgomery
Levy, M.D.: The journalist is on that's the way they shape that that narrative so it's very difficult to get a clear understanding. Levy, Of what's going on, because everyone is going to be influenced by their their beliefs and and they frame it in a way to where we only see.
00:34:25
Tony Montgomery
their way, um whether it's conscious or or unconscious. And then, so the the classic definition states that the frames um select certain aspects of a perceived reality to make them more noticeable, only simplifying the message to to mobilize support.
00:34:43
Tony Montgomery
So news media can frame a protest as riots by lawless thugs or as an uprising of frustrated citizens, which we saw with the um Black Lives Matter when when the protests happened.
00:34:58
Tony Montgomery
yeah had one news group talking about the rioting. We had one news group talking about the protesting. even though it was the same like exact story, is there a way that we can intermingle those things together so that we can get a complete understanding of the narrative?
00:35:12
Tony Montgomery
Yes, but does that does that create um Does that create more viewers? Does that create more um us versus them? Therefore, we're going to spend more of our time.
00:35:24
Tony Montgomery
it It doesn't. it It dissolves that ability. And that's why these news organizations, they they don't they don't do that. Independent media has been covering it better, but these these mainstream news organizations do not do a great job of that.
00:35:40
Tony Montgomery
So... The narrative angle, the perspective, the choice of words leads to opposite beliefs about the the protesters. um Because humans rely on stories to contextualize information, the first story we hear often becomes the lens through which we interpret later facts.
00:35:56
Tony Montgomery
This is revealed to the primary primacy effect and confirmation bias in cognition. Once a narrative frame, group X is victimized and group Y is established in someone's mind, they will perceive subsequent events in line with that frame. Here's more evidence of X harm and Y. So that you're constantly looking for that to fit that narrative, to fit that confirmation bias and will downplay or fail to notice the facts that that don't fit, um which we can all see this play out in in today's society more than than we would like.
00:36:30
Tony Montgomery
especially after this last election, um far more um divisiveness and and disruption, um even though the the polls and in the statistics show that we have more in common than we do apart.
00:36:45
Tony Montgomery
And that's just the way that we're wired and that's just the way that we we get taken advantage of in these in these contexts. So we tend to see what the story leads us to expect. Our sensory perception itself may not change, but our interpretation of those sense data, um essentially our perspective is colored by the stories we believe.
00:37:06
Tony Montgomery
So a good example of this is when they brought in the, and and how the the narrator and the narrative can shape our beliefs, um not only currently, but generation and generation and generation. And um ah good story in this aspect is the um story of how they put the um the books of the Bible together the,
00:37:34
Tony Montgomery
the early 300s in carthage they got together um far removed from from jesus far removed from um all that encapsulated within within the writing of the bible and they decided on which books to to put in and and which books to take out and at that point in time there was a book called the acts of paul and and thecla and the acts of paul and thecla is a is a sec second century um text that narrates the story of dekla young woman who becomes a follower of paul after hearing his teachings on chastity and and celibacy and she defies social norms um by rejecting marriage baptizing herself and embarking on missionary work
00:38:19
Tony Montgomery
um The text highlights a narrative where a woman takes on a prominent and active role in spreading Christian teachings. However, early church leaders such as Churchalon rejected that text partly because it promoted the idea of women preaching and teaching, which was controversial at the time.
00:38:35
Tony Montgomery
So they noted that the text was used to justify women teaching and baptism practices he opposed. So this narrator, this person who controlled the narrative, removed that book and instead chose to put in 1 Timothy.
00:38:50
Tony Montgomery
And there's been a lot of debate on the authorship of who actually wrote this book. um The first epistle to Timothy, um particularly 1 Timothy 2.12 states, I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man. She must be quiet.
00:39:07
Tony Montgomery
This passage has been central to discussion about women's roles in the church. Many modern scholars question the Pauline authorship of 1 Timothy, suggesting that it may have been written after Paul's death by another author aiming to address specific issues in the early church.
00:39:22
Tony Montgomery
This perspective is based on differences and in writing and style, vocabulary, and church structure compared to Paul's undisputed letters. So the contrast between empowering the narrative of thekla and the restrictive instructions of 1 Timothy reflects these broader debates in early Christianity about women's roles. And this was done um by this narrator who just had different beliefs And through that process, you can see how, as the Bible was created, it created this narrative of a patriarchal society um that we still engross ourselves in in today.
00:40:02
Tony Montgomery
And you can see how unfortunate that is, but you can also see how powerful that can be and why we fall victim to it. um And I think the understanding of these ideas help us to not fall victim to these things. We need to be more skeptical of things. We need to have a very skeptical mind of when we when we are told something, maybe ask ourselves like, oh yeah, why do I agree with this so much um versus why do I not agree with this side?
00:40:33
Tony Montgomery
And have this dialogue in our head instead of just blindly following it and believing um And we there's there's and other stories of this as well. One of them we'll get to ah with with Nazi Germany, but narratives um versus analytic evidence.
00:40:48
Tony Montgomery
A challenge in modern society is that compelling stories can sometimes outweigh factual evidence in people's minds. Psychologically, this is related to the availability heuristic. We judge the frequency or risk of something by how easily examples come to mind. A vivid story provides a very available example, which can make us believe something is common or likely, even if statistics show otherwise.
00:41:11
Tony Montgomery
um Jonathan Haidt, or Steven Pinker, sorry, talks about this a lot, how crime rates have significantly gone down. um But if you look at the news, if you if you talk to people, ah we would have the opposite opinion of that. We would think that crime is on is on the rise, but it's at a historic low.
00:41:31
Tony Montgomery
But our narrative mind is swayed by emotional truth of the story, how it felt. Does it feel like it's low? um not necessarily the numerical truth. Social psychologists have found that personal antidotes often persuade more than data.
00:41:45
Tony Montgomery
Right. So we use our feelings, we use our emotions to create this belief, as opposed to looking at the hard facts. um And again, as you can see, evolutionary, like that's ingrained in us. That's very um important, but it's also maladaptive in a lot of ways. And I think that these companies, these organizations understand the psychology behind it and understand how to to manipulate us differently.
00:42:11
Tony Montgomery
and we need to we need to make sure that we're able to conceptualize this and and move forward and and not be persuaded by those things so you get campaigns that share one individual story of suffering can elicit more empathy and donations than one that cites the large scale of a problem um this is summed up in the saying one death is a tragedy a million deaths is a statistic in cognitive experiments participants might change their beliefs about an issue ah say the danger of a certain disease more after reading a single survivor's tale than after reading a dry epidemiological report.
00:42:48
Tony Montgomery
This doesn't mean people are incapable of rational thought, rather highlights that our default mode of sense making is his narrative. um The scholar Walter Fisher calls humans homo neurons and proposes that narrative paradigm theory that people inherently approach the world in terms of stories Judging them by coherence, does it hang together? Or fidelity, does it ring true to our experiences rather than by formal logic?
00:43:14
Tony Montgomery
So if a new piece of information is to be believed, it often needs to fit into a narrative that individuals find um coherent and credible. If it doesn't, the person may reject the information or reinterpret it to fit their existing story confirmation bias right this is how perception and perspectives feed each other in a loop our perspective is essentially the story we have about the world um about how the world works and then this perspective affects what we perceive what we pay attention to which in turn reinforces the perspective so you can see this loop that gets brought about
00:43:48
Tony Montgomery
And breaking a person out of a deeply held narrative typically requires an even more compelling counter narrative.
Propaganda and Collective Beliefs
00:43:54
Tony Montgomery
um Raw facts alone may bounce off.
00:43:59
Tony Montgomery
So this idea of um how this works in in in reality, right? There's propaganda and conspiracy narratives throughout history. Leaders and movements have used grand narratives to shape collective beliefs, sometimes with dire consequences.
00:44:16
Tony Montgomery
We have the theory of the Judea Masonic conspiracy theory. don't know if you guys are are familiar with this, but it was its origins were in in France. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, French figures like Augustine Breaux propagated the idea that Jews and Freemasons were conspiring to undermine Christian society.
00:44:37
Tony Montgomery
This narrative was further reinforced by the 1806 Simonian letter, which falsely claimed that Jews had infiltrated Freemasonry and were plotting to control Europe. These ideas gained traction in France and laid the groundwork for future anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.
00:44:55
Tony Montgomery
This conspiracy theory um was not confined to France. In Germany, the Nazis embraced and expanded upon these ideas, portraying Jews and Freemasons as enemies of the state. um Reinhard Hedrick, a high-ranking Nazi official, viewed both groups as threats to the German race and advocated for their elimination.
00:45:13
Tony Montgomery
In Russia, the fabricated document known as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion emerged in the early 20th century. This text falsely depicted a Jewish plan for global domination and incorporated elements of the Judeo-Masonic conspiracy.
00:45:27
Tony Montgomery
So despite it being debunked, it was widely disseminated and contributed to anti-Semitic settlements in Russia and beyond. The Nazis utilized these conspiracy theories to justify their anti-Semitic policies.
00:45:39
Tony Montgomery
They organized anti-Masonic exhibitions and propagated the idea that Jews and Freemasons were responsible for Germany's problems. This narrative was instrumental in garnering public support for the regime's actions against the groups.
00:45:54
Tony Montgomery
So that's propaganda disseminated a narrative also of Aryan racial purity threatened by Jewish conspirators, bolstered by relentless storytelling in posters, films, speeches, right? This narrative, though false, took hold of the perceptions of many Germans, framing every economic woe or social change as part of that sinister plot.
00:46:15
Tony Montgomery
It shows how this ah cohesive narrative repeated often can override individual firsthand experiences as many people come came to interpret their hardships through the lens of the the propaganda story.
00:46:28
Tony Montgomery
So part of this conspiracy um is the narrative has its own self-sealing logic. Neurobiologically, one might speculate that the reward circuits are involved here too, discovering evidence that fits. One's favorite narrative likely releases dopamine given a sense of validation.
00:46:45
Tony Montgomery
If dopamine activity is abnormally high or unchecked, it can even lead to seeing patterns and storylines that aren't there, um which is what happens in in psychosis. And researchers Fletcher and and Frith have noted that when brain dopamine is dysregulated, people may give excessive meaning to coincidences, forming delusional beliefs that get reinforced by internal narratives.
00:47:07
Tony Montgomery
The internal storyteller in our mind can lead us astray if it isn't balanced by reality testing. So we have perception versus perspective, which we touched on a little bit, right? The the user's question specifically asks how perception affects perspective in the context of storytelling.
00:47:24
Tony Montgomery
and We can interpret perspective as the interpretive lens of worldview, largely shaped by narratives we hold, and perception as the intake of sensory or factual information. Storytelling often acts as a bridge between raw perception and interpretive perspective.
00:47:41
Tony Montgomery
For example, two people might witness the same car accident, the same perceptual event, but their perspectives might differ dramatically if they carry different narratives about the drivers involved. One has a belief that city drivers are reckless, while the other believes that intersection is cursed with bad luck.
00:47:57
Tony Montgomery
Each will tell a slightly different story of what they perceived, emphasizing elements that confirm their prior narrative. Over time, our dominant narratives perspectives can actually influence what we notice.
00:48:09
Tony Montgomery
um This is akin to the psychological phenomenon of selective attention. You tend to see what you're looking for or expecting. In one sense, perception feeds narrative. A single surprising perception like seeing something one cannot explain might spawn a news story or conspiracy to explain it, but far more often narrative feeds perception.
00:48:30
Tony Montgomery
We fit what we see into the stories we already believe. and So we have this selective attention, um which we can see within the realm of relationships, where if you have someone in a relationship that thinks the other person is cheating on them,
00:48:45
Tony Montgomery
they will have this selective attention to um whatever that person does no matter what they do they're going to find it to be um an act of infidelity and they're going to look and they're going to search and they're going to find what they're looking for whether it's true or not because their attention has already been directed towards this idea of this is the truth so one could say that storytelling hacks our perception by adding context um A trivial example is is how a simple narrative can change a visceral perception task. So if people are shown ambiguous images or optical illusions and given a story prompt, um this is a scene of a family by a river that will perceive the image in line with the prompt, seeing shapes as a boat or fish that match the story context.
00:49:29
Tony Montgomery
eyewitness testimony research, it's known that the the way questions are framed, what did the tall man say versus what did the man say, can influence the witnesses remembering seeing essentially insert a narrative element um that the man was tall into the perspective.
00:49:47
Tony Montgomery
And we've seen this within the research of um they had the lion research where they had two lions drawn on a piece of paper. and they brought in one participant for the study and they had nine other actors that were a part of the study that the participant thought were also participants.
00:50:06
Tony Montgomery
And the first story study goes where they asked the participant first, you know, which line is bigger. And it was pretty obvious, as you can see, you can look it up, you can Google it, that there's a clear delineation between which line is bigger and which one is is smaller.
00:50:23
Tony Montgomery
um So every time the participant was asked first, he got it right he or she got it right and then the next part of the study was they asked the actors which line was bigger and which line was smaller and the actors started to name the smaller line as the bigger one.
00:50:46
Tony Montgomery
So by the time six, seven of them said that the smaller one was the bigger one, the participant started to question his own beliefs and started to think that, hey, like maybe maybe I'm not seeing this correctly. How can all these other people see this and say this is the right one when I see this and this is not the right one?
00:51:07
Tony Montgomery
um So what they found at a high percentage that the participant changed their answer and picked the smaller one after the other actors had picked it. So that something as simple and as easy to see as that, we were able to be manipulated based off of the story that the people told.
00:51:32
Tony Montgomery
um And we see this through the ideas of um the Nazis in Germany getting twisted into this idea. And we see this within the Milgram electric shock experiments. We see this in the Zimbardo prison experience.
00:51:49
Tony Montgomery
We see this idea that we're easily um to be manipulated and into doing things out of the context or to question our own beliefs and our own morals. um And it's it's really not hard to do. And that's, ah it's interesting. It's unfortunate.
00:52:07
Tony Montgomery
And I think understanding the perspective allows us to understand how these um how we can overcome some of these influences as well.
00:52:16
Tony Montgomery
So we we're constantly bombarded with narratives, news reports, posts, videos, all vying to shape our view of the world, um recognizing that a story's emotional power can distort assessment or that the first narrative we hear can become sticky in our mind.
00:52:31
Tony Montgomery
helps us remain critical consumers of information, right?
Responsible Storytelling
00:52:35
Tony Montgomery
So we have to understand that these are the processes that we go through and to be able to pull ourselves back and ask these critical questions so that we can overcome getting manipulated and and pulled in the direction that may not necessarily meet the facts.
00:52:49
Tony Montgomery
And it also highlights the responsibility for storytellers. The stories told in journalism, education and politics um carry real weight in in shape and beliefs and should strive for truth and and empathy rather than manipulation.
00:53:06
Tony Montgomery
So that's kind of like the basic groundwork of of storytelling and and the neural side, the cognitive side and and the evolutionary side of how that that shapes us. And in the in the next episode, um we'll go into the mental health side of things.
00:53:20
Tony Montgomery
And we'll also go into um the applications of of storytelling ah knowledge in in modern context. So education and and learning through stories, along with the ethical ability of storytelling and how we can use embodied storytelling and narrative and exercise to get us moving in in the right direction.
00:53:46
Tony Montgomery
so that's what will be in the in the next episode. um And then just to wrap up this one, the the idea that
00:53:56
Tony Montgomery
human culture is driven um through algorithm media of today. Storytelling has been a ah constant current shape in how we understand reality and ourselves.
00:54:10
Tony Montgomery
We trace through multifaceted influences of of storytelling on human beliefs, um highlighting evolutionary roots, neurobiological underpinnings, psychological mechanisms, and diverse modern applications. The evidence is clear that our species evolved not only to use language, but to organize meaning in and and narrative form and adaption that enhanced social cohesion, learning, and survival.
00:54:35
Tony Montgomery
The very structure of our brain reflects this. The networks that bind events into coherent sequences, mirror neuron systems that let us live imaginatively in other shoes, reward systems that respond to emotional arc of a story.
00:54:50
Tony Montgomery
Storytelling's impact on belief formation is powerful. Narratives can persuade more profoundly than logical argument by engaging people's emotions and identity. They serve as a vehicle for ideology for better or worse, capable of spreading enlightenment or propaganda. A single story skillfully told can change how thousands think about a social issue or how an individual remembers their past.
00:55:13
Tony Montgomery
As such, storytelling is a tool, one that demands responsibility. pen camera truly can be mightier than the sword and changing minds, which is why understanding the narrative influence is crucial in education, journalism and governance and why it can often be used to manipulate us and in in the way we see the world and the way we see people in the world.
00:55:37
Tony Montgomery
So I hope that this gives you an idea and an understanding of um how this comes about and and how we can overcome it ourselves and create a better ah better narrative of cohesion instead of um divisiveness.
00:55:51
Tony Montgomery
So i hope you guys enjoyed ah this podcast. And like I said, next week, we'll go over um some more ways that we can use storytelling in a positive aspect to um move us forward and exercise mental health and um ethical considerations. So I hope that you guys enjoy and then we'll tune in next week.