The Power of Stories

People remember stories. In fact, psychologists claim they are even stored differently in the brain – they are “psychologically privileged.”

Setting up lessons as stories can be very useful for helping students pay attention and think about meaning.

Think of the elements of a story. First there’s causality. Students have to think about the causal relationship between events in the story. Then there’s conflict. Every good story has conflict. Conflict usually involves complication. After all, conflicts without complications are not that interesting. And finally, there must be character. What are the characters of the story like? What are their personal qualities?

According to Willingham, “…using a story structure brings several important advantages” when communicating with others.

“First, stories are easy to comprehend, because the audience knows the structure, which helps interpret the action. For example, the audience knows that events do not happen randomly in stories. There must be a causal connection, so if the cause is not immediately apparent, the audience will think carefully about the previous action to try to connect it to present events.”

“Second, stories are interesting.” Researchers have determined that stories are more interesting than other formats, even when the material presented is the same. Why is this? Stories demand inferences that act as slightly difficult problems that people like to solve. (See chapter one.) However, people consider stories with too much detail to be less interesting, because too much detail does let the listener make inferences.

“Third, stories are easy to remember.” This is for two of the reasons mentioned above. Stories demand we make inferences, so we are doing a little bit of problem solving. Also, stories have a causal structure which helps us remember the plot.