Journalists regularly tell stories about people who have experienced a variety of health and social problems. A sizeable body of research has found that stories can change attitudes and opinions about a variety of topics. However, stories told by journalists often do not adequately reflect the diverse perspectives from relevant social groups (by gender, race, ethnicity, for example) on social issues like family leave policy and early childhood education. This can be problematic because people overgeneralize from these story examples, which can lead to misperceptions about the types of people and groups who suffer from the problem. Personal stories can also invite audiences to blame individuals for problems that have broader societal causes and require multi-level policy interventions to solve. These findings highlight the need to consider what we know about how to tell compelling stories about people and groups that promote a broader understanding of the roles that laws and policies play in shaping health and social well-being.
What have we learned from our work on how to tell compelling stories for social change? For starters, while stories do not always offer clear advantages over other forms of communication about social issues, we have shown that stories can change how people think about social factors that shape health and increase support for evidence-based policies that target those factors (see here and here). Our work identifies several ingredients for successful stories for social change:
(1) Acknowledge that individuals make choices that affect their health and well-being but emphasize the social, economic, and environmental barriers to those choices (see here);
(2) Avoid incidental details that run the risk of making a character less empathetic or identifiable (see an example here, where details on a child’s interest in a first-person shooter video game led to judgments about parental choices and responsibility);
(3) Scale up – convey, either through words or images, that the story exemplifies a broader pattern of experience that applies to many other people and groups; and
(4) Show how evidence-based policy solutions will help both the character themselves and the larger population(s) that they represent (see here and here).