Our fondness for narratives is driving us mad

We seem to be in a golden age of storytelling. Is it inhibiting rather than creating empathy?

By Jonathan Gottschall. Excerpts:

"Well-publicized studies have shown that empathy is a bit like a muscle: The more we flex that muscle by consuming fiction, the more it swells. Research conducted around the world has repeatedly found that merely watching television shows or listening to radio dramas featuring diverse protagonists reduces a variety of viewer prejudices with more power and durability than do more conventional approaches to prejudice reduction like diversity training. Moreover, in an age of furious polarization, a 2021 study in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that humble personal anecdotes can bridge fraught moral and political divides even when factual information can’t."

"The act of generating empathy can also produce empathy’s inverse: a kind of moral blindness to the humanity of whoever’s forced into the villain’s role. Fiction, as Fritz Breithaupt explains in his 2019 book “The Dark Sides of Empathy,” conjures not just empathy but “empathetic sadism,” which he defines as “the emotional and intellectual enjoyment that most people feel in situations of altruistic punishment” — for example, when the hero kills, captures, or humiliates the villain.

Empathetic sadism can spill over tragically from fiction to reality. A classic example is “Birth of a Nation,” the 1915 film that spread the mythology of the KKK. But its effects are most destructive in the narratives we label as nonfiction. Research in the emerging field of narrative psychology shows that people don’t come equipped with two narrative modes — one to cope with the neverlands of fiction and another to cope with the complexity of real life. Regardless of where stories sit on the fact-fiction continuum, they have a tendency to divide people into a moralistic trinary of heroes, villains, and victims."

"how can we tell stories that build empathy and connection while weakening their capacity to provoke divisive us-vs.-them thinking?

We need to move past any simple, naive intuition that storytelling must be a net good in human life. We have to recognize how our political narratives lure us into fantasies where “we” are good guys and “they” aren’t. These stories not only make us angry and judgy; they make us feel triumphantly virtuous for being so angry and judgy. It’s true that the most febrile narratives of wicked conspiracy, invented or elaborated by the most dangerously talented political storyteller in American history, are boiling up on the American right. But narratives on the left, for all the empathy they claim to champion, are also guilty of villainizing and thereby dehumanizing people on the other side."

"by stripping away the caricatured villains from our political narratives and embracing the principle of moral ambiguity, we can make our stories of reality not only as empathetic and socially productive as great fiction but perhaps even as true."