Infecting An Audience: Why Great Stories Spread

In his 1897 book What is Art? the great Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy defined art as "an infection." Good art, Tolstoy wrote, infects the audience with the storyteller's emotion and ideas. The better the art, the stronger the infection––the more stealthily it works around whatever immunities we possess and plants the virus. Tolstoy reached this conclusion through artistic intuition, not science, but more than a century after Tolstoy's death this is exactly what psychologists are finding in the lab. When we enter into a story, we enter into an altered mental state––a state of high suggestibility.

Note that this goes against our culture's dominant idea about stories. When I ask my students why people like stories, most cite escapism. Life is hard. Storyland is easy. Stories give us a short vacation from the troubles of our real lives. We enter the pretend worlds of stories and have a nice time, and then walk away unscathed and unchanged. But if we think this we are wrong. Studies show that our fears, hopes, and values are strongly influenced by our stories.

[image error]Image: Flickr user Martin Cathrae

For instance, if psychologists get a bunch of people in the lab and just tell them all the reasons it is wrong to discriminate against homosexuals, they don't make much progress. People who feel differently dig in their heels. They get critical and skeptical. They don't walk out of the lab with more tolerant views. But if they watch a TV show like Will and Grace, which treats homosexuality in non–judgmental ways, their own views are likely to move in the same non–judgmental direction. And if a lot of us start empathizing with gay characters on shows like Ellen, Modern Family, Six Feet Under and Glee, you can get a driver of massive social change. American attitudes toward homosexuality have liberalized with dizzying speed over the last fifteen years or so, and social scientists give TV some of the credit.

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