Story Lab: Fiction and its Influence on Real Life

This week, I decided for my last Story Lab that I would be doing the Stories and Friends activity. This consists of two TED Talks: 

The danger of a single story, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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And Imaginary friends and real-world consequences, by Dr. Jennifer Barnes

(screenshot from the source)

Both of these TED Talks look at how stories influence real life beliefs and attitudes, but they approach it in different ways: Adichie from her personal experience, and Barnes from a scientific standpoint.

Adichie explains her experience of growing up in Nigeria, and how reading stories by European authors influenced her early beliefs in childhood. She also discusses how, now that she’s an adult and an author, people will often generalize the stories they hear about one culture to the entire culture. For example, she talks about how a character in her book is a male who is an abusive father. She had someone come up to her after a discussion who said he had read her book and thought it was a shame that all Nigerian men were abusive fathers. (Her response was that she had just read American Psycho, and she thought it a shame that all American men were psychopaths). 

Adichie’s overall point is that people will take the single story they hear about something and will assume that anything they encounter in real life fits that story. Essentially, she is describing how stereotypes work. At the end of her talk, she emphasizes that it’s important for people to have more than just the “single story,” so that they can broaden their views and not base things on the assumption of one story.

Barnes, as I said earlier, approaches things from a scientific view. In her TED talk, she explains how the relationships people form with fictional characters work, and how this affects someone’s feelings and behavior. Essentially, with both fictional characters and celebrities, we see them in situations we wouldn’t see real-life people in (vulnerable moments, private moments, etc.). People form strong attachments because of this, but it’s a one-sided relationship (to paraphrase Barnes, I know a lot about Taylor Swift, but she doesn’t know I exist). To show this, Barnes and her grad student Jessica Black conducted an online survey. To summarize, they found that people cared more if a fictional person they strongly connected with died than they would if someone they knew casually in real life died. This is because of the one-sided relationship, called a parasocial relationship.

As I’ve mentioned previously, I actually work in Barnes’ research lab. There are several different experiments being done, but the idea of the parasocial relationship tends to be a topic in many of the experiments. As a psychology student I find this area fascinating. I knew Barnes as a writer before I knew her as a psychology professor, and this was one of the first TED Talks that introduced me to her as a professor. It’s all very exciting research, and I’m hoping I’ll get to contribute in the future.