Which stories do you remember?
And how have they influenced your life?
Intuitively, we all know the power of stories. They teach us what’s wrong and what’s right, who are heroes and who are villains.
Stories help us make sense of who we are (or who we want to be).
Years ago, a powerful story embedded itself into my mind, influencing how I view the world …
The story I remembered
In 1964, Kitty Genovese was stabbed in New York in the middle of the night.
What I remember most vividly from that story is that none of her 38 neighbors called the police. No one went outside to help her.
Her neighbors watched on from the safety of their apartments, their windows lit up. That is the image that got stuck in my mind.
Why did nobody try to help?
Genovese’s story was widely reported, not so much because she died from her stab wounds but because her neighbors ignored her screams for help. The story was a symbol for the anonymous life in big cities, and it was used as proof for the bystander effect. That’s why I came across it. The bystander effect suggests that if more people watch an accident happening, they’re less likely to help out.
Even while typing this story now, I feel the cold creeping into my bones. I shiver.
Are humans really so indifferent to each other?
But what if the story is wrong?
I recently read a different version of Kitty Genovese’s story in Rutger Bregman’s book Humankind.
Kitty Genovese didn’t die alone.
Her friend Sophia Farrar rushed out of her apartment to help, risking her own life. Genovese died in her arms.
The original story I read suggests 38 eyewitnesses were doing nothing, just watching.
That’s also untrue.
It was a cold night, and most people slept with their windows closed. They didn’t hear anything. Of the people who did wake up, two called the police.
Bregman’s version of Kitty Genovese’s story is not a story about indifference. It’s the true story of a caring neighbor and authorities showing up late.
(…) the only thing that can replace one story is another story.
~ Yuval Noah Harari
How to persuade with stories
In his book Humankind, Bregman is on a mission to show us that humans are basically good, and he deploys a powerful way of persuasion.
First, he tells us a story illustrating the indifference, aggression, and selfishness of human beings—just like the bone-chilling story of Kitty Genovese as I had originally read it. It is one of the many mistold and misremembered stories that Bregman corrects in his book.
Next, Bregman retells the story. He shows us what really happened—Kitty Genovese didn’t die alone; her friend Sophia Farrar rushed out to help her. It was the police who showed up late.
Bregman also tells fresh stories, like the story of 4 bystanders—complete strangers—who jumped into an ice-cold canal in Amsterdam in February 2016 to save a mother and her toddler trapped in a car. Another vote against the bystander effect.
Last but not least, Bregman backs up his stories with wider analysis and facts. For instance, Marie Lindegaard analyzed thousands of videos of “brawls, rapes, and attempted murders” in Copenhagen, Cape Town, London, and Amsterdam. Bregman quotes Lindegaard:
In 90 per cent of the cases, people help each other out.
Sure, the bystander effect exists. Sometimes we let others take charge or we’re afraid to do the wrong thing. But a meta-analysis of 105 studies on the bystander effect also shows that if the emergency is life-threatening, then there’s an inverse bystander effect. Bregman quotes the authors of that analysis:
Additional bystanders even lead to more, rather than less, helping.
This combination of storytelling and data is compelling.
A story engages us emotionally and helps us remember, and the data connect the story to the bigger picture. The story makes the data meaningful.
We are what we believe
According to Bregman, there’s a “persistent myth that by their very nature humans are selfish, aggressive and quick to panic.”
However, time and time again, the true stories show that when a crisis hits, humans become their best selves. They help each other. They’re compassionate.
Bad news is broadcasted for 24 hours every day of the week, and it warps our view of humans and the world. In his book Factfulness, Hans Rosling calls it our “overdramatic worldview.” Journalists focus on bad news because that gets more clicks and more views. We all pay more attention to bad news; it’s called the negativity bias.
When we were still hunters, living in the wild, our negativity bias helped us watch out for and avoid danger.
But now, our negativity bias warps our world view. The constant stream of negative news makes us all think the world is doing a lot worse than reality, and it makes it hard to believe in our inner goodness. How can we believe in humankind when all we read are stories about greed, rape, aggression, murder, and war?
Of course, humans are complicated. We’re not all good and not all bad. Such a binary choice is a dramatic oversimplification.
But think about this …
What would happen if, instead of focusing on our bad side, we took a more positive and more realistic view of humankind?
What if we believed more in our fellow humans and arranged our society accordingly?
Bregman shows us what happens when we start from a perspective of trust and friendliness. A company where employees are trusted to make decisions, increases it profitability. Children thrive at a school where they create their own curriculum; and no bullying exists. Citizens participating directly in budget decisions feel more engaged. And recidivism goes down thanks to a friendlier jail.
What story do you want to tell?
Stories shape our view of the world.
And in turn, our world view influences the stories we share and remember.
But we have a choice.
We can amplify hatred. Or we can choose kindness. We can reinforce divisions. Or we can choose to reach out. We can be indifferent. Or we can choose to care. We can succumb to despair. Or we can choose a spark of hope.
We’re unable to choose in what kind of society we’re born.
But we can choose what story we want to live. We can choose to make tiny ripples to change the world.
We can choose to spread love.
I’m not insisting that we be brimming with hope. It’s OK not to be optimistic. Buddhist teachings say feeling that you have to maintain hope can wear you out. So just be present. (…) The main thing is that you’re showing up, that you’re here, and that you’re finding ever more capacity to love this world because it will not be healed without that.
~ Joanna Macy (in conversation with Krista Tippett, On Being)
PS Thank you to Rutger Bregman for writing his book Humankind (and inspiring this post). And thank you to my friend Hongli Joosten-Ma for encouraging me to read Bregman’s book and to write about it.
Books mentioned in this post:
- Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman (highly recommended!)
- Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong about the World–And Why Things Are Better Than You Think by Hans Rosling (also highly recommended)
Recommended reading on the power of storytelling:
8 storytelling techniques to captivate a business audience
5 types of stories to market your business
How to write an inspirational business story
Thank you, Henneke, for another inspiring article of yours.
I have recently watched a tv series about a swedish journalist, KIm Wall, killed by a man in Denmark, in 2017.
The tv series title is “The investigation”.
Instead of representing a typical drama and thrilling story that you can watch in a lot of tv series, the filmmaker Tobias Lindholm chose to show the humanity of the chief of the danish investigator while he was looking for the truth about the murder.
In “The Investigation”, for example, you never see the killer and you never hear his name. You can discover the victim’s photo just at the end of the last episode.
The filmmaker Lindholm – who recently won the Oscar writing the script of the Danish film “Another round” – through “The Investigation” changed the rules about the storytelling of a thriller tv series.
Many people have been astonished about his choice. I read that some of them found “The Investigation” disappointing. But I am sure that many other people understood the message: there are human beings, as the chief of the police in Copenhagen, who lets us hope that a better world is possible.
That’s so interesting! I love the idea of a documentary about a crime being chiefly about kindness.
Thank you so much for sharing, Maurizio. I hope you’re keeping safe and well.
Henneke:
Your posts are often a beacon of light, showing the way to share hope, love, and inspiration via the words we say or write, and through the stories we tell. This particular share illuminates not only a valid perspective for stories that live around the stories we hear but, also that even “true” stories are a version of the facts. Interestingly, I love watching documentaries but it recently suddenly hit me how a lot of the way story tellers of this type of work unfurl their individual tales seem to follow a typical pattern. As such, I am looking more closely for the ones who do it completely differently. Not too much variety in general. It makes me wonder about ways to make these type of stories more interesting and way different than the next. I also appreciate when stories don’t slant so far in a perspective that, instead, you have to think about things and have an opportunity to decide for yourself versus being told how to think. Not only do I agree the media likes the negative, I also feel they flame divisiveness among us as well. It’s a good time to take nothing at face value and appreciate the other truths to a lot of what we otherwise are fed! As always, thank you, Henneke, for illuminating another idea for your readers to consider.
Wishing you sun and fun in the coming months, Sue-Ann
Thank you for your lovely comment, Sue-Ann. I wanted to write something that was positive and uplifting. I needed it myself, too.
I love your point about appreciating stories that don’t slant towards a specific perspective but instead make us think.
Thank you so much for stopping by.💜
I think Bregman is naive.
I also think we are neither good nor bad. But we are selfish. It is how we are programmed. Wishing it to be differently is not going to change it.
Yes, we can choose to be good, up to a certain point.
Of course, we’re not completely selfless. That’s not what Bregman is suggesting either. But I don’t think we’re programmed to be selfish either. There’s lots to suggest that our brains our wired to work together. A lot of stories are told to “prove” our selfishness are actually not correct. For instance, the Lord of the Flies is a fictional story. The real story of a group of boys getting shipwrecked on a island is a story of survival, cooperation, and friendship. To survive, we depend on each other. Bregman is pushing back against the dominant narrative that we’re selfish and aggressive towards each other.
OK, fair enough, I did not read the book! Just heard about it. I stand corrected!
Yup! There are 2 sides to EVERY story…especially when dealing with the “news” of our day. Great post and definitely want to read Factfulness because I know my world is not even close to what I told it is suppose to be.
That feels so true.
The book Factfulness helps understand how we misinterpret or misremember facts and how that influences our world view. The book Humankind focuses more on the stories that are mistold or misremembered, and how that influences our perspective on the world.
I enjoyed both and found them both helpful.
Thank you for stopping by again, Margie. I appreciate it.
Hi Henneke,
Super interesting post. Indeed we have a choice and choosing kindness is the option that makes more sense. Factfulness is one of my all-time favourite books.
I hope you are keeping well,
Virginia
Hi Virginia,
I loved Factfulness, too, and it has made me much more aware of how numbers are often misreported by not setting them in context. Maybe it’s one for another blog post at another time?
I hope you’re keeping well, too. It’s good to see you again here. Take care.
I find this true in so many aspects of life, especially the news, which is why I quit watching it.
I know this was supposed to be a lesson in writing, but I got so much more out of it!
I’ll try to remember this the next time I craft a story!
I also quit watching the news (actually quite a long time ago), but I still read the newspapers online daily. I stopped reading newspapers for a few weeks last year, too. It was really helpful to unhook from the news for a while. I realized how much impact it had on my well-being. I now try to be more aware that the news always feeds our negativity bias. I try to limit my time reading newspapers (not always successfully), and I like to look out for positive stories.
Thank you for stopping by, Kim. I much appreciate it.
Lovely writing that I enjoyed to the very end. Thank you!
I enjoy long form and am lucky enough to have a few authors who keep me involved by offering good information and opinions that help me think through their points.
I’m so happy to add you to my list of writers. Now I’m off to devour your other suggested articles, all of which speak to me, and sound delicious.
What a lovely compliment, Sheila. Thank you.
Thank you for sharing.
Your posts are always so inspiring.
The books you mention make me think of Pinker´s Enlightenment Now. Deep reasoning with data on how the world is better today.
I look forward on reading them,
Best.
I haven’t read Pinker’s Enlightenment Now. I will check it out. Thank you for the suggestion, Carlota. I appreciate it.
I just finished writing an article called “why we humans need to connect”. It’s a real life story of people getting together and connecting. It’s about a man travelling around the world alone, asking strangers in every town if he could stay with them for the night. He stopped one day in Red Deer, Alberta, Canada and asked that and also who was the most friendly person in town.
He was directed to a man in the local Immigrant Welcome Centre and he held weekly barbecues so people would get to know each other.
It ended with the people at one barbecue singing a song for kids, by Raffi called “the more we get together the happier we’ll be. I’ve included the youtube link to the song https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-MQBa4WRpI ENJOY!
What a lovely story. Thank you for sharing, Trudy.
It’s like you heard my distress and addressed it. I have been in near physical pain with all the hatred I have been witness to here in the USA. I need to order this book from the library before I disagree with its objective.
Warm regards <3
I hear you. It’s hard. I hope you’ll find the book useful. Take care.
This is a lovely and needed expression of faith in human nature! Thank you!
Thank you, Pam. It feels good to have written this.
Henneke,
Thank you so much for this wonderful story. I needed this today.
One of the highest compliments I have ever received on my writing was from a reader who said “thank you. You took me on a little trip all my own.”
It doesn’t get any better than that.
Thank you, Henneke, for taking me on a little trip.
May life bring to you all the wonder and magic it has to offer.
Thank you, Dennis. That’s indeed a wonderful compliment. I appreciate it.
Henneke,
Great article. You are right on point.
We need to turn off the network news and all start talking to each other in a civil and respectful manner.
Well done!
Dan Shyti
Thank you, Dan. I agree with you. Less news, more connecting in a respectful manner. It’d be so much better!
Thank you, Henneke. I had not heard the true story of Kitty Genovese. What you’ve written here is really important. As a side note, I always enjoy the books you recommend and have ordered Humankind from the library.
I was surprised by how untrue the story I had heard was. It has been so widely reported. There are many more stories that are mistold and I had no idea. So good to get the corrected versions from Rutger Bregman. I hope you’ll enjoy his book, too!
Thanks for this ray of light. It’s a beautiful way to remember what I’ve always believed to be true about humankind—that there is more good among us than there is evil.
Thank you, Lee. I’m glad this resonated with you, too.
I think I’ve always still believed in human goodness, too. But the amplification of hatred and divisiveness worries me, as well as indifference and lack of community. Bregman’s book gives hope that there’s another way.
Hi Henneke,
A compelling story! In my generation, story-telling was still a thing. Today, we all have ADD courtesy of mainstream and social media. If the story is more than 10-30 seconds long, eyeballs, ears, and brains get lost. So sad.
Thanks for sharing and eliciting a fond memory.
I feel more optimistic and believe that when we use good storytelling techniques, people will still engage with our stories. Long form content is still read—as long as it’s interesting and keeps a good pace.