Story Lab: TED Talk Videos

For this Story Lab, I watched Ted Talks about stories and storytelling. The first video is the TED Talk of a woman named Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie from Nigeria. From a young age, she has been a storyteller. She read foreign books for much of her childhood and based the stories she wrote based on what she read in these books. She eventually discovered books and she learned that writers could look like her. When she came to university in the United States, her roommate was surprised to learn Nigeria has English as an official language and that she was familiar with many of the comforts of American life. She believes people like her roommate have a view of Africans because of writing that portrays them as living in a dark place. When Chimamanda wrote a book, her professor told her the book was not "African enough" because the characters were similar to him, a middle-class man, and they drove cars. When she visited Mexico, she realized she saw the people there as poor immigrants based on what she read about them in the news. She believes storytelling often shows the differences between people rather than the similarities and stories should tell several facets of a person's life, rather than just one. 

In the second video,  OU psychology professor Jennifer Barnes wonders why people spend so much time reading fiction and what effects this has on us. Specifically, she looks at the engagement readers have with fictional characters and why readers care so much about these characters. We feel connected to characters because we know what they do and think in intimate moments, despite knowing they will never know who we are. To see what effects "losing" a fictional character has on a person, Barnes had participants rate how sad they would be if their favorite character died and how sad they would be if an acquaintance died. Men's responses were almost equal for the two, but women overall said they would be more sad about the death of their favorite character. 

Both videos showed me that stories can play a major role in psychology. This first video showed that people can often become stuck with one idea about a person based on the stories they hear about them even though there is so much more about that person. The second video showed that people can become very invested in fiction, especially through the connections they feel to characters. The two videos are proof that stories can be very important to people and their perceptions of others. 

Harry Potter by Dave Catchpole