I am totally uninterested in sports and would rather poke a stick in my eye than watch any
type of game—basketball, football, or baseball. The only thing worse for me than watching team sports is listening to people talk about team sports (and sports fans certainly like to talk about it). So it may be somewhat surprising to hear that two of my favorite movies in recent years have sports themes: Moneyball and Silver Linings Playbook (for a synopsis of these films, click boxes). I’ve watched both of these movies several times and enjoyed each viewing more than the previous one. They are now on my list of all-time favorite movies, along with Fargo, Alien, and Gone with the Wind (think true heroines, a rarity in Hollywood).
My disinterest in sports is not unlike the attitude of the average person on the street towards science. I can’t name popular sports figures (LeBron who?) and know next to nothing about sports statistics—and don’t want to. Similarly, most people do not recognize the names of well-known scientists (other than Einstein), and many exhibit little understanding of general scientific inquiry (how to conduct an experiment, for example). Moreover, certain science topics, such as climate change or stem cell research, have been imbued with controversy and doubt. To counteract such strong negative reactions to scientific topics, there needs to be something powerful to hold the viewer’s attention. Mere facts and figures won’t do it.
Of course, my two movie examples (and the books they are based upon) are not just about baseball or football. They each tell a compelling, yet familiar story. The stories are so compelling that they totally overcome my dislike of anything that is about sports statistics or that features sports fanatics. The stories even made me sympathetic to sports fans’ fascination with their teams and statistics.
That’s the power of storytelling.
There has been a lot of emphasis recently on storytelling in science— how it is important to tell a story when delivering a science message (see Randy Olson post). Stories help us connect with an audience and also make our science information more memorable. However, most of us—scientists, that is—have trouble with the concept of storytelling. We are suspicious of this whole storytelling business. It sounds too much like…well, exaggeration or misdirection. We prefer facts and figures and logic and think that everyone else should as well. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your viewpoint), the rest of the world does not think like us. Facts and data fall on deaf ears, but a story grabs and holds the otherwise disinterested viewer.
Scientists also have trouble with the mechanics of storytelling, which seems so alien to how we normally talk about science. In our rush to inform and educate the viewer, we forget that not everyone is as fascinated with the data or our topic as we are. So to reach others with our science videos, we must learn to present our information in a way that resonates with the viewer. And telling a story is an effective means of making people pay attention and remember our message.
In this post, I thought I would turn to an expert storyteller for some insights. Kurt Vonnegut was not only a great American writer but thought a great deal about the mechanics of storytelling. He developed a series of graphs that show the distinct patterns of some of the more popular storylines. These graphs plot the shape of stories, about which Vonnegut stated, “There’s no reason why the simple shapes of stories can’t be fed into computers.” In other words, stories can be analyzed and categorized, which helps us better understand how to construct a story and how we can apply these shapes to tell our science stories.
The video below shows an excerpt from a lecture Vonnegut gave in which he explains the graphs for three popular storylines.
Vonnegut’s graphs tell us that many seemingly dissimilar stories repeat familiar patterns—patterns that we recognize, if not consciously, at least on a subconscious level. How does this help us with telling science stories? Well, if we do try to use stories in our science messages, we might be more successful if their shape matches one of the patterns deeply ingrained in our audience’s psyche. For example, often our research experiences resemble the ‘Man in a Hole’ pattern. We embark on a study only to run into problems with a faulty instrument….or while on a field trip, our boat breaks down and we fail to collect our samples. We find ourselves in a deep, deep hole, perhaps running out of grant money and time. In the process of dealing with these setbacks, however, we make an observation that ultimately leads to an important discovery. We end up with a paper in Science or Nature and a healthy grant that will fund us for the next five years. Everyone can relate to that story. And, of course, we would need to give the scientific details of that discovery, so that the viewer could fully understand what had happened—not unlike the way Moneyball explained baseball statistics and how sabermetrics revolutionized the sport.
Most scientific investigations have a backstory that is never told. In fact, we strive to hide those details when we prepare our manuscripts. We leave out the missteps, the failed experiments, and the negative results. We don’t report the preliminary trials that were not properly replicated or that were terminated prematurely due to equipment failure. We don’t describe the heat, rain, biting insects, or other environmental conditions we endured to collect our samples. We also usually don’t tell how we figured out a particularly vexing problem or fabricated an inexpensive but effective device to collect our samples. We don’t express in scholarly works the exhilaration we feel when we discover a new species or explain what motivated us to seek a cure for cancer. However, the stories of how we face and overcome multiple obstacles or what passions drive us are not only interesting, they reveal something about the nature of scientific investigation and of scientists. Moreover, people really pay attention to such stories and remember them.
In designing science videos, especially for a general audience, we can learn something from Kurt Vonnegut and other master storytellers. The next time you watch a movie, see if you can identify the story pattern. For more shapes of stories from Vonnegut, here’s an infographic.
