What’s Possessed Us? “The Story Paradox”by Jonathan Gottschall
14/06/2022
Many movies feature characters with dissociative identity disorder, formerly known as multiple personality disorder. But when researchers combed through all the psychiatric records from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries for a report published in 1944, they only turned up a total of 76 cases. Then, between 1985 and 1995, the number spiked to almost 40,000. Something similar happened around the same time with the still more dubious phenomenon of demonic possession. Exorcisms almost never occurred in the United States prior to 1973, when demand suddenly skyrocketed. What could have caused these sudden epidemics of severe mental distress? It’s probably no accident that the movie Sybil, featuring Sally Field in the role of a patient with sixteen different personalities, hit the theatres in 1976, three years after the premiere of The Exorcist.Somehow, it seems, watching a movie about a protagonist with several personalities, or occupied by a demon, can make some audience members believe that they are suffering from an identical condition. It’s almost as if such viewers are not content to merely watch the movies, as horrific as they are: they want to live them. Or maybe they can’t help living them.
Literary scholar Jonathan Gottschall describes a horrifying case of a man mistaking fiction for reality in his 2021 book The Story Paradox: How Our Love of Storytelling Builds Societies and Tears Them Down. A few days before Halloween in 2018, a man drove to the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, where he burst through the doors shouting, “All Jews must die!” before unloading his AR-15 and three Glock pistols. It was a Saturday morning, so the synagogue was full. Eleven people were killed, and several others wounded. Gottschall explains:
The Tree of Life killer was no mere fanboy of ancient fictions about Jewish evil; at some point he entered the fiction as a character. He made himself the punishing hero of history’s greatest epic. The killer had enmeshed himself in a nightmarish LARP (live-action role-playing) fantasy, like those grown adults who rush happily through the woods playing out Dungeons and Dragons fantasies.
But his victims were real.
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The Story Paradox explores the myriad ways in which the seemingly giant leap from fiction to reality has been, for some, more of a mincing step. Psychologists relate that there is a phenomenon called parasocial interaction, in which audiences respond to fictional characters much as they would to real people. We can easily forget that actors are only playing roles. When we witness young Jack Gleeson in the role of the cruel and remorseless King Joffrey Baratheon in HBO’s Game of Thrones, for instance, some of us can’t help assuming that Gleeson himself must resemble his character, and can barely help hating him for it. To make sense of what is going on in such cases, Gottschall borrows a concept known as the “media equation,” from researchers Clifford Nass and Byron Reeves. Gottschall writes:
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This is the crux of the issue that troubles Gottschall throughout The Story Paradox. We treat story time as merely fun and games, but even fictional stories can have serious real-life consequences. Citing the work of psychologists Melanie Green and Timothy Brock, among others, Gottschall warns that, by succumbing to narrative transportation, we open ourselves to a powerful form of influence:
We consume fact-based arguments with our defenses on high alert. We’re critical and suspicious—especially when those arguments run counter to our existing convictions. But when we’re absorbed in a story, we relax our intellectual defenses. As the narratology researcher Tom van Laer and his colleagues put it, after analyzing every relevant study in the science of stories, “narrative transportation is a mental state that produces enduring persuasive effects without careful evaluation and arguments. In other words, good storytellers bypass the brain’s processes for sifting and evaluating claims. They can implant information and beliefs—often quite strong ones—without any rational vetting.
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Every propagandist knows that you can make large masses of people suspicious of anyone who holds different political beliefs from them by simply casting them as antagonists in an engrossing story (though it is not so easy to make the story engrossing). If, say, you want to weaken the social fabric of an entire nation, you can target people on both sides of major political fault lines, delivering stories to each side that highlight and magnify the evils of people on the other. This is precisely what the Internet Research Agency in Saint Petersburg, Russia did in 2016 to hobble American democracy. One of its campaigns involved setting up one Facebook group for Texans wary of the growing number of Muslims in their community and another for those same Muslims. Gottschall reports:
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Source:
https://areomagazine.com/2022/06/14/whats-possessed-us-the-story-paradox-by-jonathan-gottschall/
