In his book Redirect: The Surprising New Science of Psychological Change, Timothy Wilson describes a large body of impressive research on how stories can cause longterm behavior change. Wilson has people rewrite a self-story. He calls this technique “story-editing.” Story-editing has been used to help people with post-traumatic stress disorder and teens at risk. The technique of story-editing is so simple that it doesn’t seem possible that it could cause such deep and profound change.
When people write a new story that describes who they are, why they behave as they do, and how they relate to others, they will, consciously and unconsciously, start to make decisions and act in ways that are consistent with that story.
But what if you can’t get someone to stop, think, and write out a new story? Does that mean that you can’t use the powerful effect of stories? Luckily, the answer is no. Even if you can’t get people to sit down and write out a new story, you can provide a story for them, and that’s almost as good.
Wilson explains how he used story-prompting to help college students stay in school, get better grades, and work harder in their courses. He identified first-year college students who were not doing well. These students were in what he calls a “self-defeating cycle.” The students were getting low grades on one or more tests, and had started thinking things like, “I’m in over my head,” or “Maybe I don’t belong at this college,” or “I’m not smart enough.” These thoughts created a new story that resulted in behavior that fit, such as not studying and skipping classes. This, of course, resulted in more low grades, reaffirming the story that the students couldn’t be successful. Wilson contrasts this with students who might also get a poor grade, but instead of believing the “I’m not smart enough” story, they believe a more hopeful story, such as “This course is harder than I thought it would be,” or “I guess my high school work didn’t prepare me well enough for this class,” or “I’m going to have to work harder, study more, maybe get a tutor.” These students’ behavior would lead to more studying and getting more help, and therefore better grades.
Wilson’s question was whether he could prompt a new story for the “self-defeating” students, even without having them explicitly write a new story themselves. Was there anything he could do to help them switch to a story that was more like the students who reacted to the poor grade by working harder?
Wilson had the students participate in an experiment. They thought they were being asked to take a survey of first-year students’ attitudes about college life. Wilson told them that they’d see the results from earlier surveys of older students, so they would know what kind of questions would be on their survey. In actuality, Wilson was showing them the previous survey results in order to prompt them with a new story.
The participants then saw the survey results of these older students that showed that many of the students had problems with grades during their first year, but that their grades improved over time. The participants read statements such as “67 percent said their freshman grades were lower than they had anticipated; 62 percent of the students said their GPA had improved significantly from the first semester of their freshman year to their upper-class years.” (This data was true, from actual earlier surveys.) To make sure that the new “story” was clear, the participants also watched video interviews of four older students who gave the same messages. The students in the videos talked about their majors, their hometowns, and career plans and then talked about their GPAs for the first semester of their first year, the second semester of the first year, and the most recent completed semester. All the students in the video interviews talked about their grades steadily increasing over time.
Altogether, the participants spent 30 minutes hearing from other students who had problems with low grades, but then improved their grades. Wilson didn’t do anything else. He didn’t counsel them, teach them study habits, or give them any other help.
The participants didn’t know that the purpose of the study was to improve their grades. What Wilson hoped was that he had prompted a new story, even if the participants were unaware of it. He hoped to prompt a story such as, “Maybe it’s not hopeless. Maybe I’m like those other students. They tried harder and were able to raise their grades.”
The story-prompting worked. Wilson reports that the participants achieved better grades in the following year than a randomly assigned control group who did not get the story prompting. The participants were also less likely to drop out of college. Imagine: 30 minutes of reading and watching videos about other people’s stories resulted in students working harder, improving their grades, and staying in school.
Let People Discover A New Story
Wilson doesn’t discuss in his book whether there’s a difference between telling people a new story versus letting them “discover” the story on their own. My sense is that the latter is better. The key is that people have to change their own story. If you just give them another story and say, “Here’s the story you have and here’s the story you should have,” it may not have the same impact as letting them discover a new story for themselves and compare it to a story they may not even realize they have. With story-prompting, it’s more effective to tell them a story about someone else and let them draw the parallels. Sometimes less is more!
Takeaways
- When you want people to take an action, you first need to understand any current self-story that might prevent them from taking the action.
- Once you know the current self-story that’s preventing them from taking action, craft a new story and then expose them to it.
- Use audio, video, or narratives of people telling their stories to effectively influence your target audience to adopt a new story.
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