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course, it was an artificial creation, a carefully designed and orchestrated operation funded by the u. N. That was what this was, a strategic plan. So could it work? Can a reality show change reality? Can you call a different world into being by telling the right story? It turns out this question has been systematically studied. I am very interested in how we make the normal? How do we make the normal? How do people come to see the world around them as an unremarkable fact, the way things are and should b betsy levy pallock, a psychologist at princeton university, has tried to answer this question by studying the media. And the study of media influence actually stretches all the way back to the second world war. But for most of that time, betsy says, psychology's focus was extremely narrow. It was all rhetoric and no poetic the way to change some one's behavior, psychologists assumed, was to change their ideas, and you did that through argument or rhetoric. But starting in the nineties, betsy says, poetics started gaining ground because psychologists realized that people consumed stories in this qualitatively different way, their defensiveness is disabled. Their counter arguing is a is at rest. See, when you're listening to a story, like, for example, the one you are listening to right this minute, there are so many things they have to do to keep up. We're trying to do a lot of things. We're trying to picture what's going on, anticipate what will happen next. It really engages us to listen to a story. Whereas am we're engaged in different ways when we listen to an argument. We assess whether we believe each assertion, and we measure up what we're hearing with what we think. What betsy wanted to understand was whether this difference in how we consumed stories translated into any changes in what we thought and how we behaved. And so she decided to do an experiment. The study that i ran was one of the first studies to t a radio program, a media intervention, kind of like a medical trial. The study took place from two thousand and four to two thousand and five in rowanda, a country still reeling from brutal genecide researches had theorized that part of what had created the genecide was, in fact, the media, specifically a hate radio station called ar m that encouraged violence in this very particular way. It set the tone. It communicated to people that this is something that the entire country is involved with right now, and that you would actually be on the outs if you were not participating in violenc and looting. Ah, so it seems as though people could behave in violent ays, not because there's animus and hatred in their hearts, but because they feel as though that's what is expected. Betsy wanted to see if you could move behaviour towards greater tolerance if you had those messages imbedded in a similar way in a different popular radio programme. So she hooked up with this organization that was in the process of creating a new radio soap opera, romeo and julia style romance between a boy and a girl from woring ethnicities. And what betsy found after a year of studying communities randomly assigned to listen to the soap opera, what it boiled down to was that, despite the fact that people loved this programme, it did not change how they personally felt about violence and reconciliation but they did state that the programme changed the way they about rowanden society and about what rowandens in general should do. Now, so it didn't change their beliefs, but it did change their perceptions of norms. And at the same time, it changed their behaviour. Which is why i thought that this was something significant. Let me repeat that, it didn't change their beliefs. It changed their behaviours by changing what they considered to be the social norm, what they thought their neighbors believed and did. That is a sobering idea, eh. This is a very uncomfortable thought. We like to think that all our behaviours flow from our convictions, and what we do is a reflection of who we are and what we think. But we're constantly tuning ourselves to fit with the social world around us, oftentimes in ways that we can't even identify. We're just trying not to stand out. So what this work suggests is that if you change some one's perception of what constitutes the social norm, like you convince people that the world is safe enough to sing in public, even though in reality, there are a dozen armed men standing just outside the door, then you might just change what they actually do in their dayto day lives. They might, after seeing such a show themselves, decide to attend a concert, because clearly it's safe enough. Or maybe they decide that they too will start at business. And in that way, you move the needle. Now, betsy hasn't specifically looked at reality television, but she asreality shows and radio, sobabros are similar. It's all story telling. You know, it's people's stories. It's, it's their lives. It's narrative. Do you think the governments

should be doing these kinds of interventions?