What happens in the mind of the listener
- Stories create emotional involvement
- Listeners visualize the events of the narrative
- People relate to the character and imaginatively place themselves in the world of the story
The Science of Storytelling
Narrative transportation
Narrative transportation is a state of total absorption in which listeners feel lost in a story, momentarily disconnecting from their surroundings and imaginatively transporting themselves into the narrative world. Originally named by psychologists Melanie Green and Timothy Brock, narrative transportation is a central concept to understanding why storytelling is so powerful at persuading people and moving them to action.
Jay’s background in psychology and neuroscience
Jay studied psychology at Yale and spent years as a Senior Editor at Psychology Today, where he covered neuroscience, decision making, persuasion, and consumer behavior.
More about JayWhy it matters for business
When listeners become absorbed in a story, it lowers resistance and increases receptivity. As they become absorbed in the emotional world of the story, they stop scanning for flaws and counterarguments.
Narrative Transportation and Persuasion
99 percent of business stories are boring and ineffective. Too often, teams rely on facts and figures, lists of features, and arguments.
But clients and consumers rarely make decisions based on information alone. To persuade them, you need to engage them emotionally—and the best way to do that is to ignite their imagination through storytelling, leading them to visualize using your product, feel the benefit, and imagine just how much their lives would improve.
Storytelling works because it arranges information the way memory actually works: as a sequence of causes and effects, with a person at the center. Instead of making listeners work to assemble meaning from disconnected points, a good story creates momentum, curiosity, and emotional involvement.
The neuroscience of persuasive storytelling
When you tell a story to colleagues or customers, you bypass the evaluative regions of the brain and activate the experiential and emotional regions instead. In their original studies, Green and Brock found that the more transported readers were, the more their beliefs shifted toward the story’s conclusions, and the fewer flaws and counterarguments they noticed along the way. A 2014 meta-analysis by Tom van Laer and colleagues confirmed the pattern across dozens of studies: transportation reliably shifts attitudes, beliefs, and intentions.
The effect shows up in the brain as well. Neuroscientist Uri Hasson’s lab at Princeton recorded speakers and listeners during natural storytelling and found that the listener’s brain activity begins to mirror the speaker’s, a phenomenon Hasson calls neural coupling. The tighter the coupling, the better the listener understands the story.
Stories captivate attention, elicit thoughts and emotions, and ignite curiosity, so listeners are always tugging on the rope, eager to hear more. Rather than inundating people with information they do not care about and cannot absorb, storytelling creates a meaningful structure for information and makes persuasion far easier.
If you want to see how these principles apply directly to customer conversations, pitches, and presentations, visit Storytelling for Sales.
The Science of Storytelling
Explore the science of storytelling
From Theory to Practice
What your team walks out with
Too often, employees sit through workshops and hear a bunch of complex principles they never think about again. They go back to their day-to-day work and nothing changes. In Jay’s storytelling workshops, he gives participants time to apply the principles they’ve just learned to their real work, and get feedback from Jay and each other. Everyone walks out with a piece of their own real work that they’ve actually improved during the session.