The psychology of stories

1
The psychology of stories

• Communication 200 (Oct 4, 2000)
• Kristine Samuelson
• Byron Reeves

2
Why are stories compelling?

• The grammar of stories matches the way humans
  think and feel
• Stories have evolutionary significance
• The person with the best story survives
• Stories influence conscious thought
• Bias in memory
• Effects on judgments and evaluations

3
Assumptions of psychological theories about
stories

• People are mentally active
• People try to organize information
• Unidirectionality of thinking -- people reduce
  complexity they dont create it
• Reduction of complexity is efficient but often
  troublesome (e.g. stereotypes)
• Stories organize thinking

4
Information processing models

• Three stages of processing
• acquisition of information
• retention
• retrieval
• Primary attention to representation of
  information in memory
• Stories are the stuff of memory

5
Three different storage units

• Sensory storage
• information that impinges on sense organ
• veridical and decays in seconds
• The work space
• temporary storage
• decays in minutes if not permanently encoded
• Permanent storage
• long-term memory
• Stories are most important for organizing
  permanent memory

6
Organization of information in permanent memory

• Similar information is stored together
• The most general concept that describes storage
  is schema
• Types of schema
• Scripts -- social action as a series of events
• Prototypes -- idealized schema used to categorize
  more highly variant information
• Story grammars -- organization of information by
  event sequences

7
More about schema

• Similar to common ideas about thinking
• top of my head
• that makes me think of
• Stanford students always
• that reminds of what happened next

8
Schema are interconnected networks of information

• Networks of information
• Storage bins filled from the top

9
Predictions about media effects using this model

• Information decays if not encoded as a story in
  permanent storage
• The most recent stories are templates for
  long-term memory
• Stories bias memory by adding and subtracting
  information
• Recall best for story consistent information

10
The psychological parts of stories

• Psychological stages of a story
• equilibrium at the outset
• disruption of equilibrium by some action
• recognition of the disruption
• uncertainty about the the possibility of repair
• attempt to repair the disruption
• reinstatement of equilibrium

11
Memory for story consistent information (A. Lang)

• Empirical study about broadcast news
• Inverted pyramid vs. story sequence
• Better memory (recall after watching) for stories
• Stories liked better than facts
• Implications for assignment editors?

12
The study of stories in media effects

• Agenda setting effects
• Which stories are important vs.
• What the stories convey
• Cultivation effects
• Media centralize story telling
• The central stories bias local interpretation
• Priming studies
• Mere presence of stories influences processing of
  subsequent information

13
Arousal and stories

• The creation and resolution of conflict is
  arousing and compelling
• Get them sick, get them well advertising
• Physical arousal in violent video games (story
  games vs. random killing)
• Arousal and drama
• Being excited is separate from feeling happy or
  sad
• Arousal transfers from bad feelings to good
• The arousal of conflict in stories feeds the good
  feelings at time of story resolution

14
Can the influence of stories be unconscious?

• Subliminal priming
• Much interest in media effects
• Many contemporary examples
• RATS
• Sex in ice cubes
• The Lion King
• Connections between story elements need not be
  conscious

15
Unconscious priming in psychology

• lots of empirical interest recently
• none of the studies are like the popular claims
• different vocabulary - semantic activation
  without subjective awareness

16
Unconscious paradigms for priming

• dichotic listening
• cocktail party phenomenon
• shadowing
• parafoveal vision
• information flashed outside of visual focus
• backward pattern masking
• information flashed quickly at point of focus
• beyond subjective or conscious identification
  threshold

17
A media experiment

• Could this work with video?
• Video clips below and above identification
  threshold
• 1 frame with mask
• 2 frames with mask

18
Experimental design

• Happy or sad face, or no picture
• 20 seconds of person talking (newscaster,
  moderators in ads, etc..)
• Rate emotion of people in the video

19
Results

• Priming of related information is influential
  even when its conscious
• People need not aware of the material being primed