How Effective is Personal Storytelling?: Strategic Insights from Social Movement Theory

Fannie Lou Hamer, photo: Warren K. Leffler, US News & world report, now in the Library of Congress

All the social change movements I've known have involved storytelling to bring our messages to the public. For example, in the Central America anti-intervention movement, we brought survivors of death squads to the US to tell their stories, and similarly with South Africans oppressed by apartheid.

At United for a Fair Economy, we lifted up the voices of wealthy individuals discussing how, since they became wealthy through no effort of their own, they didn't deserve or want a tax break. Recently Iraq Vets Against the War organized "Winter Soldier" testimonials about the realities of the war.

There are many good reasons to tell such stories, reasons familiar to most of us , but also some less familiar reasons to be skeptical about using personal stories in a habitual or non-strategic way. Two books from the sociology of social movements offer strategic advice about when and how to use storytelling and when to use other ways of communicating a progressive message instead.

Building Movement Cohesion

For certain purposes, there is little doubt that personal stories work. Linda Stout is a well-known advocate of storytelling to build a community of trust. In her book Bridging the Class Divide, about growing up in severe poverty and then organizing the Piedmont Peace Project, she talks about people bonding across differences of black/white, rich/poor, and South/North by telling their life stories during weekend retreats. As Alcoholics Anonymous and other support groups have learned, sharing personal stories strengthens bonding among members of small, ongoing groups.

Storytelling can also be powerful on a bigger scale, across a whole movement where most people never meet face-to-face. Sociologist Gary Alan Fine has a positive take on the role of storytelling in movement building. In an article in the anthology Social Movements and Culture, about public narratives in movements for social change, he wrote, "A movement is a bundle of stories… A group with a shared narrative tradition may be better able to mobilize its members." Fine defines three types of stories used by movements. First, stories of oppression justify involvement in the movement. Second, stories of struggle incorporate events into the history of the group. Third, stories with happy endings emphasize the impact of the movement and thus reaffirm its value, persuading people to become involved or stay involved.

Reaching the Public

But what about in even broader contexts, when communicating with people outside the movement? If a social change group has a chance to do a media interview, or to give testimony in front of decision-makers, is a first-person story that illustrates the injustice under discussion usually a good use of that one opportunity to reach a wider audience?

Most social change groups would answer yes. Whenever we've had a spokesperson available and willing to tell a personal story, progressive activists have tended to prioritize that narrative over other kinds of messaging, such as facts and statistics, creative metaphors, logical arguments, inspiring rhetoric, or third-person historical narratives.

Into this consensus, two skeptical authors inject some doubts. Sociologist Francesca Polletta studied situations where people had a choice between telling a personal story and talking in a different mode, situations where she could measure the outcome. She studied murder trials of battered women who killed their abusers, comparing the outcomes for defendants who did and didn't take the stand to tell their abuse story. She listened in on the deliberations over design of the 9/11 memorial in New York City, a public process in which some participants told their personal stories and some used other kinds of arguments. She looked at whose ideas prevailed.

The findings she reports in It Was Like a Fever support the power of storytelling, but only when done in certain ways. Otherwise, stories can backfire, alienating listeners instead of persuading them.

Polletta found that in effective stories, the teller stands with the listeners at a distance from the story, reflecting back with an ironic or wise perspective on her or his former self. To imagine this distancing mechanism, think of the familiar cadence of evangelical preachers: "I was once a sinner like you. Oh, how I sinned. But since I turned to Jesus…" When the teller's stance is inside the story, still experiencing what happened as if it's happening now, listeners are less persuaded.

Stories of Hardship Can Backfire

Realistic, chronological stories -- the very common format of "this happened, then that happened" -- tend to be ineffective, Polletta found. As a community organizer, I was sometimes guilty of encouraging a community resident to step in front of a microphone with too little rehearsal time, leading to a chronological tale of multiple, unrelated hardships, usually ignored by the media and public officials.

Every detail in an effective story has to make a point consistent with a frame familiar to the listeners. Fortunately, our culture is full of meta-frames that fit progressive messages. For example, David versus Goliath has strong cultural resonances. But if the point of a story is too obvious, people feel preached at.

Polletta found that victim stories in particular may fail to inspire the intended empathy, reinforcing stereotypes instead of breaking them. I described Polletta's findings at a recent activist event, and when I said, "victim stories often backfire," long-time immigrant rights activists jumped in to agree. Stories of the harsh lives of undocumented immigrants, no matter how movingly told, have been failing to win public support.

I had a similar experience during the failed struggle to preserve the safety net in the mid-1990s. Many of us anti-poverty organizers took it as a matter of faith that if only legislators got to know recipients and understood their lives, they wouldn't support such draconian policies. So brave women would go from office to office in the Statehouse telling their life stories. Frequently, as an advocate for human services, I would be the next person to talk with the same legislators, hearing their reactions to recipients' life-stories. I heard either, "If she can talk so articulately, she could get a job," or "The reason she's poor is those family troubles she mentioned, the unwed pregnancies, (or the alcoholism, or the abuse); those aren't the state's fault." Women on welfare couldn't win for losing. Whether they came across strong and competent or troubled and struggling, the spin was against them. When we did persuade some legislators to change their minds and oppose the welfare cuts, it was often with facts presented in a cost/benefit framework familiar to them.

Polletta found that the status of the teller makes a difference in the impact of storytelling. More privileged people can sometimes get away with breaking the rules of public discourse in a way that less privileged people often can't. Well-off whites and men can express emotion and reveal personal details and still sway mainstream listeners. Stereotypes say that less privileged people, whether women, people of color or working-class people, are irrational and dysfunctional; revealing painful personal stories can reinforce those stereotypes. Long-term, fundamental change is needed to eliminate these stereotypes and status differences.

But doesn't the media love human interest stories? Yes, but that's not always helpful to our causes. Sociologist William Gamson has analyzed social movements' results in mainstream media; he found that a bright spot in how corporate media operate is their reliance on dramatic narrative.

If we can package our stories as dramas with a villain, a hero, and a conflict, we have a much better shot at getting TV or newspaper news coverage. But Nina Eliasoph doesn't have such a rosy view of this media norm. As she researched her book Avoiding Politics, she followed activists behind the scenes and in public, and found a dramatic difference between the ways they spoke in those two contexts.

In activist meetings and private conversations, local women faced with toxic threats would speak from a public-spirited concern and a broad analysis of the problem. But when they were in front of a microphone, they would say, "I'm just a mom, and I want to keep my children safe." Eliasoph calls this de-politicization "momism," the tendency to reduce political concerns to personal concerns. By cooperating with media norms that spotlight individuals, activists collude in painting a picture of an individualistic society with no role for collective action.

More evidence for Eliasoph's conclusion can be found in a sociology experiment by Shanto Iyengar, who had people watch TV segments that followed an individual's story (episodic format) or segments that focused on an issue over time. Then he had them fill out a survey about who was to blame for various social problems. The people exposed to the episodic format were less likely to hold public officials accountable. The human interest stories in mainstream media often portray people as victims, not as agents taking action against systemic injustice.

Often activists don't have any choice but to package up one person's story for media consumption. But when we do have some control over the content of our messaging, it might benefit our causes if we sometimes chose to put forward a story of collective action or a broader analysis, instead of having a standing preference for telling an individual's story.