Uh, happy new year?
So, there’s kind of a lot going on. It’d be overpromising to say I have a coherent 500–1000 words on the state of democracy in the United States right now, and what that has to do with storytelling, and why it all matters. It’s hard to see the shape of the narrative while you’re still inside it.
So as much as I love hot takes, today I don’t have one. What I do have is a plea to use story responsibly.
Marketers, fundraisers, political communicators, and creative teams talk a lot about how storytelling is a really powerful tool. I talk a lot about it too, first because (spoiler alert!) I want people to hire me to write stories for them. But I also talk about this because I think recognizing what storytelling is and the power it can hold over us is deeply important.
Here’s a passage from a 2012 qualitative study on organizational leaders’ use of storytelling at work, “Leadership Manipulation and Ethics in Storytelling”:
“Brown et al. (2009) state that stories are deeply implicated in organizational life and scholarship. They (p. 3025) argue that stories are 'always replete with meaning, often containing moral judgments' and emotional reactions. Driscoll and McKee (2007) suggest that storytelling by leaders, which integrates a moral and spiritual component, can transform organizational culture so that the members of an organization begin to feel connected to a larger community and a higher purpose. In this sense, storytelling has a positive moral aspect. However, Driscoll and McKee (2007) also raise the concern of the potential dark side of storytelling by leaders by arguing that caution has to be taken whenever there is a discussion of the emotional and moral influence of stories on employees.”
Take “employees” and replace “constituents” and there’s a lot here that speaks to what’s going on in the US right now. The study authors identify two ethical issues in storytelling. The first is that, by definition, it’s a little manipulative––that is, you’re explicitly crafting a narrative to elicit a specific emotional reaction in the audience. The second has to do with the purpose of the storytelling. What goal are you trying to achieve through use of this tool? They posit a sort of “ends justify the means” framework, in which, if leaders are using storytelling in a transparent way to inspire their employees toward a positive goal, this manipulation is more ethical than, say, in the case of telling a misleading story in order to encourage staff to accept subpar working conditions.
Outside the paper’s scope is the question of how leaders are held accountable to this ethical framework. From my perspective, if you think about the act of storytelling as first and foremost an act of communication, there are two axes of accountability: that of the storyteller themselves and that of their audience. A storyteller could choose to withhold from telling misleading stories or from abusing their platform for their own gain. Likewise, a listener/reader could choose to condemn a storyteller for obvious falsehoods or for blatantly abusing their power for nefarious ends––by invoking a white supremacist coup d’état on the US Capitol, for example.
Clearly, a lot of leaders don’t really care whether their ends are nefarious, in which case, it falls on the audience to have the critical capacity to analyze what they are being told, decide whether to believe it, and what, if any, action to take as a result. The problem is that there’s very often a power differential between speaker and audience that complicates this dynamic and makes it harder for the listener or reader to tease out what is true and when they’re being manipulated. There’s nearly always a hierarchy: president/voter; celebrity/fan; teacher/student; boss/employee; author/reader; etc. Additionally, dissecting messages, questioning intent, and searching for further information is a complex skill that has to be learned over the course of many years. (Insert plea to stop cutting funding to the humanities here.)
Back to the power differential question, though. This hierarchy between storyteller and audience is more widely discussed in some areas than others. The paper cited earlier is unusual in that it discusses storytelling amongst corporate managers. A lot of the resources out there about ethical storytelling are created for nonprofits, with the aim of helping organizations think critically about how they’re using stories. Who is telling the story? Who is benefitting from the story? Is anyone being revictimized or put at risk as part of this process? Who is holding the power, both in the story and in the storytelling situation?
These are important questions, and I believe politicians, marketers, activists, and leaders in every industry and cultural space should be asking them. Because today we’re seeing the results of a whole lot of irresponsible storytelling, with the wrong heroes, the wrong villains, and some really insidious assumptions.
So, what do we do? I’d go back to the idea of storytelling as, in its simplest terms, a form of communication between one human being and another. The story forms a link between speaker and audience. One link at a time, storytelling helps craft wider connections between members of a group, helping them feel like they’re part of something larger. According to at least one scholar, those same connections may be part of the answer for combating unethical narratives.
In an analysis of propaganda campaigns that emerged during Australia’s wildfire crisis, linguist Chi Luu suggests strong social ties as a potential barrier to these threats. “Perhaps the fight against disinformation lies in the relatively strong networked ties that a smaller nation like Australia can still strive to maintain,” she writes. “Sociologist Mark S. Granovetter found that information can spread far and wide along weak and marginal ties in a network, but when a group has multiple and strong ties among its members, misinformation such as rumors can be suppressed at many points and die before they spread too far.”
The United States is, of course, not a small nation. And maybe the diffuse and erratic spread of information across such a large population is part of the problem. But I also find the idea that we can fight damaging narratives, even just amongst the people with whom we share close social ties, very hopeful.
To me, that’s the whole point: using storytelling for good.
Stay safe out there, all.
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Erin Becker (she/her)
Writer | Communications Consultant | Storytelling Expert
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