How Stories Can Increase Perceptions of Competence

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People use stories rather than other forms of information In interpersonal interaction. If you use a story that increases perceptions of somebody as being sort of warm and friendly Um, whereas if you use statistics and facts that Increases perceptions of competence. And then the other thing that we've found in our lab is that if people are if they're the ones that are good at telling the stories What that seems to do is increase perceptions that either that person is of higher status Or that they have the potential to achieve higher status That's very cool. I would like to think that their that sort of stuff is still happening out there somewhere Mm-hmm.

In this episode we discuss the power of narratives to affect our beliefs and behaviors with Melanie C. Green, a psychologist who studies the persuasive power of fiction.

According to Nielsen, the TV ratings company, the average person in the United States watches about 34 hours of television a week. That’s 73 days a year. Over the course of a lifetime, the average American can expect to spend a full decade lost in the trance spell that only powerful narratives can cast over the human mind.

What is the power of all the stories we consume through television? What about movies and books and comics and video games and everything else? How does it affect our beliefs and behaviors?

We discuss all of that and more with Melanie C. Green who is a social psychologist who developed the transportation into a narrative worlds theory that helps explain total story immersion and how it translates into influence over our real-world behaviors. Green is an assistant professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. You can find her on Twitter using the handle @NarrProf or her website.

After the interview I eat some chocolate orange cherry cookies sent in by Elliot Jones and then discuss how photographs can either enhance or dampen your memory depending on how you use them.

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