Five Ways to Reignite Your Passion for Teaching

Amy L. Eva, Ph.D. 

The education content specialist at the Greater Good Science Center.

https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/five_ways_to_reignite_your_passion_for_teaching 

Even the best work can wear us down. How do we find inspiration and purpose again?

What gives you a sense of meaning in your work, even on the tough days?
When I posed this question to a group of teachers recently, no one focused on academics. Instead, their responses centered on their students’ engagement, the sense of participating in something larger than themselves, and the deep satisfaction they gained from relationship building.

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“When my students make me laugh, and when they do that ‘oooooooooohhh’ sound that kids do when they finally ‘get’ it,” confessed a fifth-grade teacher. “Knowing the work you do is bigger than yourself is what keeps me motivated,” said a university professor.
A 20-year veteran kindergarten teacher said this: “It’s still the relationships I build every year that give me the most meaning. … Even now I get in the car at the end of the day and think, What was great about today? What was hard? How can I improve tomorrow?”
If you are feeling a bit worn down right now and need some inspiration, here are five practical ways to pause, reflect on your work, reconnect with your role and purpose. It hopefully goes without saying that these tips aren’t just for teachers—they can be adapted by almost anyone who needs to reignite his or her passion for work.

1. Revisit your story

Researchers remind us that having a purpose in life is crucial for our health, longevity, and well-being. At the Greater Good Science Center’s Summer Institute for Educators, we invite educators to reflect more deeply on their purpose and identity in the following activity, which you can do at home (in your pajamas with your favorite beverage):

• Create a brief timeline of several major events, turning points, and epiphanies that made you the person and education professional you are today.
• Choose two or three of these events and reflect on each one. What feelings do you associate with the event? What lessons emerged for you? What obstacles and supports did you encounter? Did you learn anything about your strengths, weaknesses, motives, and values from this event?
• Overall, what story does your timeline tell about who you are?

According to psychologists, we all have an internalized narrative that explains how we became the person we are today and where we are headed tomorrow. As we revisit our story, it can help us to understand how and why we became an educator. It may also help us to answer the question “Who do I want to become?”

2. Celebrate a favorite teacher or mentor

Here is another simple exercise to try at home or in a staff meeting. If you try this activity with colleagues, partner up and stand back to back while listening to each question read aloud; next, turn and face each other as you share your responses. The process of pausing, reflecting, and then listening to your partner, in close proximity, may help you to focus more on the words and emotions shared.

• Describe the teacher or mentor who had the most influence on you.
• How did you feel when you were with this person?
• How did you change as a result of this person?
• How did this person shape your life as an education professional?

Bonus: If we lean on each other for social support (and inspiration), we are less likely to be depressed and more likely to be resilient at work.

3. Connect with like-minded colleagues

When I talk with teachers, I often recall an image of myself during my first year of high school teaching. I would escape into my little cubby-hole of an office at lunchtime and lie flat on my back with the lights out. I felt totally overwhelmed and isolated that year; I was trying my hardest to meet the needs of 163 students every day, and I was physically and emotionally exhausted. The principal stepped into my classroom only once that year, and the teachers down the hall kept to themselves.

Teachers connecting at the Greater Good Science Center’s Summer Institute for Educators

We can’t do this alone. And there are lots of opportunities to connect (especially if you feel like you don’t have the time). I know groups of teachers who meet weekly at a restaurant or bar to grade papers and talk. I know teachers who run together, meditate together, and camp together.
There are also many more formal opportunities to grow professionally and personally, meet new colleagues, and develop networks of support. For example, you can take an online course at Mindful Schools, participate in the CARE retreat for teachers, or apply to join us for the Summer Institute for Educators here at UC Berkeley. A new year-long program called Transformational Educational Leadership is also inviting applications.
Bottom line, reach out (even when it’s tough). Nurture new friendships while pursuing new professional development options.

4. Prioritize your well-being

If you are a teacher, there are probably plenty of obstacles preventing you from engaging in self-care. We teachers are notoriously resistant to helping ourselves out. So perhaps the argument below might convince you that your personal and professional well-being must be your number one imperative.
A recent report by the Aspen Institute, “The Evidence for How We Learn,” makes it crystal clear: “For social, emotional, and academic development to thrive in schools, teachers and administrators need … support to understand and model these skills, behaviors, knowledge, and beliefs.” Children learn social-emotional skills by being exposed to adult behavior. “If a teacher doesn’t have a level of social-emotional competence … then he or she is sending mixed messages,” writes Patricia Jennings, in her book Mindfulness for Teachers.
In addition to seeking out social support, there are many other research-based strategies for self-care, including physical exercise, mindfulness, self-compassion, and cognitive reappraisal (reframing your thoughts in response to a challenging exchange with a student, for example). There’s also a place for just forcing yourself to get up and go to that party even though you want to curl up in a ball on the couch—a technique psychologists call behavioral activation.
“Self-care is not a luxury,” write John Norcross and James Guy. “It is a human requisite, a professional necessity, and an ethical imperative.”

5. Create a resilience plan

Of course, developing social-emotional skills takes time, and resilience is an ongoing, dynamic process of adaptation and growth. So, why not create a plan?

• Consider (or try out) some of the research-based practices above.
• Notice which ones seem appealing, enjoyable, or helpful.
• Think about how you might incorporate one of these into your life.
• Choose one self-care strategy or practice to implement in your daily life (or almost every day) for at least 5-10 minutes. (Keep it simple.)
• What kinds of obstacles and barriers might arise? How might you address those obstacles? How will you encourage yourself to prioritize this plan?

As you commit to a plan, keep holding on to the parts of your work that give you meaning. And remember the wise words of a teacher I know: “Care for yourself as hard as you care for those kids.”

Five Ways to Help Teens Think Beyond Themselves

 

 Amy L. Eva, Ph.D. 

The education content specialist at the Greater Good Science Center.

https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/five_ways_to_help_teens_think_beyond_themselves#gsc.tab=0 

Part of finding your purpose is connecting and contributing to something larger than yourself. 

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Teens can seem self-centered sometimes, can’t they?
Of course they can; they’re still supposed to be developing the capacity to see beyond themselves. They can also seem to lack a strong sense of purpose—and that’s not surprising either, because the ability to think about other people is developmentally linked with a sense of purpose.

“Purpose is a part of one’s personal search for meaning, but it also has an external component, the desire to make a difference in the world, to contribute to matters larger than the self,” write psychologists William Damon, Jenni Menon, and Kendall Bronk. Some researchers call this external component the beyond-the-self dimension of purpose: Why am I here? What role can I play in the lives of those around me?
A new study of adolescents and emerging adults confirms that many young adults simply do not exhibit a beyond-the-self dimension of purpose. In fact, a beyond-the-self intention is even “atypical” of adolescents, according to researchers.
That being the case, how can we as parents and educators help them to find that intention?
Here are five research-based ways to inspire teens to connect with something larger than themselves.

1. Support teens’ beyond-the-self interests

Get to know the passions of the teens in your life. Do they love caring for little children or animals? Do they talk a lot about sustainability? Is there a political cause that they want to support?

• Join the Purpose Challenge

  Want to help high schoolers find purpose? The GGSC's Purpose Challenge for students, educators, and parents incorporates cutting-edge science into videos and interactive exercises. High school seniors can discover their purpose, then inject that purpose into their college essays and submit that essay to win up to $25,000 in scholarship money. Contest deadline is Feb. 1, 2018.
  

“Purposeful youth described getting encouragement for their interests rather than hearing the more general encouragement to get good grades and go to college,” says Stanford psychologist Heather Malin, director of research at Stanford’s Center on Adolescence. “Some reported getting material and social support for their beyond-the-self interests.” For example, parents or caregivers might buy them books relevant to their interests, give them rides to volunteer work, or invite their child to volunteer at their workplace.
When adolescents can find clubs or structured school activities that connect with their broader interests, they are likely to become more personally motivated and engaged in those activities. If we encourage teens in pursuing their beyond-the-self interests, they are also more likely to have a stronger sense of purpose in the world.

2. Discuss values and character strengths

Perhaps one of the most powerful ways to foster a beyond-the-self intention in teens is through reflection on their values and opportunities to act on those values.
“Purposeful teens talk about big, abstract values (equality, diversity, justice, community, etc.) more so than non-purposeful teens,” says Malin. It’s crucial for them to have “opportunities to write about or discuss the things that matter most, especially in terms of the values they want to live by.”
One way to get youth to think about their own values is through the VIA (“Values in Action”) Survey. This helps students to identify potential character strengths—such as kindness, teamwork, fairness, and leadership—and envision ways to act on those strengths.

• 

  Use Your Strengths

You might also share this Use Your Strengths practice with teens to help them focus on one personal strength each day for a week. For example, if kindness is a potential character strength, they might engage in a random act of kindness each day. Or if they choose to focus on teamwork as a strength, they might look for different ways to encourage teamwork at home or at school.

3. Facilitate activities that enhance empathy and perspective-taking

Another practical way to nurture beyond-the-self thinking is through learning experiences that focus on empathy. Researchers have linked empathic concern to prosocial behavior, while it may also play a role in decreasing different types of aggression.
Michele Borba, author of the book UnSelfie: Why Empathetic Kids Succeed in Our All-About-Me World, outlines multiple strategies for fostering empathy in kids as well as ways to teach perspective taking. She suggests keeping a journal in tandem with reading a novel, where students record immediate responses as if they were the book’s central character, literally stepping into someone’s shoes and imagining the perspective of the person who might wear them. Borba also proposes honoring “Hero Days”—a time when students dress up as an admired historical figure while speaking as if they are that famous person.

4. Expose teens to diverse perspectives

There is a powerful argument for diversity in schools and classrooms. A recent study of several thousand middle schoolers suggests that students feel safer, less bullied, and less lonely in more racially balanced classrooms.
But there may be other important benefits. If children and teens are exposed to a range of emotional styles and different ways of thinking and being, they may be more likely to engage in prosocial (kind and helpful) behavior. 
For example, we know that many ethnic groups (e.g., Mexican American, African American) demonstrate a more communal and collectivist way of thinking that counters the individualism that prevails in much of North America. There is also evidence that teens who identify more with religion may be more prosocial. Further, a new U.S. study suggests that people from a higher social class experience greater self-oriented feelings (e.g., contentment and pride), while those identifying as lower social class experience more other-oriented feelings like compassion and love.
Because teens, in particular, have an increased cognitive capacity for perspective-taking, this is an important time to expose them to many different ways of thinking and being. Teachers might consider inviting a range of guest speakers to the classroom, regularly planning for cooperative learning activities with mixed groups of students, and leading interactive, inquiry-based learning experiences that feature service learning activities in the neighborhood.

5. Model empathy and prosocial behavior as an adult

Finally, when parents and caregivers model empathy and find ways to contribute to their own communities, they encourage their kids to do the same. Thanks to a motivated network of moms at school, for example, my daughter has been able to make blankets for local refugees, participate in food drives, and regularly volunteer at an organization that provides diapers and baby supplies for families who need them.
In this divisive political climate, however, some of us may be struggling to engage in our communities. We may feel exhausted or discouraged; we may even feel like hiding. It can feel daunting to reach out in a world that feels topsy-turvy. If this is the case, it’s so important to nurture our innate capacity for care and attunement.

How to Use Your Unconscious Mind to Achieve Your Goals

John Bargh

James Rowland Angell Professor of Psychology at Yale University, where he directs the ACME (Automaticity in Cognition Motivation and Evaluation) laboratory.

https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_to_use_your_unconscious_mind_to_achieve_your_goals 

 The most effective way to change your behavior for the better is to work in tandem with your unconscious mind.

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 It’s the end of January. How many of us made New Year’s resolutions this year, but have already broken them? Maybe we told ourselves we’ll exercise more, or spend more time with our children, or not get so angry all the time. But we’re no closer to these goals than we were before.

It turns out that part of the problem is the way we make these resolutions: They rely on our conscious decision-making processes. We just set a good intention to do things differently, and we leave it at that. But experience should tell us that good intentions are often not enough. 

In my new book, Before You Know It, I present all the ways our personal ship of good intentions can get blown off course by the powerful unconscious motivations and environmental cues that also influence what we do. Because we are not aware of these unconscious influences, we do nothing to counteract them. Yet they are like the currents and winds that affect a ship’s course just as much as the captain’s rudder. Ignore them, and you may drift further out to sea—or crash into the rocks. 
The first question to ask yourself when a resolution is failing is: Do I really want to change? If you are honest with yourself, maybe down deep you actually want to keep drinking, or overeating, or not exercising. And those “wants” are going to override the good intentions of your resolutions. 
There was a famous experiment done at Princeton many years ago with divinity students—highly moral and compassionate individuals. They were supposed to give a sermon in their next class, but the experimenters intentionally made them late; they had to hurry to be on time. Along the way, a person lay in distress in the hallway, but the late students rushed right by and didn’t help. Their goal to get to the next class on time overrode their own personal values, and they failed to act on those values and help the person in need. Ironically, the topic of the sermon they were to deliver was the Good Samaritan parable from the Bible.
The same thing can happen to you and me. Despite our values and intentions, we may have some other goal that conflicts with our new resolution. And if our resolution is something that, down deep, we don’t really want to change, our conscious mind is very adept at coming up with convenient excuses and rationalizations. “Hey, I’ll start that new diet tomorrow.” And then that tomorrow never comes.
So ask yourself if you are truly committed to change. Only if the answer is “yes” can you overcome those powerful winds and currents that can drive you off course.
Another surprisingly powerful influence on what we do comes from environmental cues that trigger behaviors unconsciously, without our realizing it. The behavior of others, for example, is quite contagious, and we can “catch” it through our daily contact with other people and even through social media.
If our Facebook network connects us to overweight, depressed, lonely, cooperative, or happy individuals, even if we don’t know or interact with them personally, we ourselves are more likely to be those things, too. And TV and other media ads affect us in the same way: We tend to eat more when we see food ads, and teenagers tend to drink more alcohol the more alcohol ads they see. 

By acknowledging these unconscious influences on us, we actually increase the amount of free will that we have. If we deny these effects exist, then we are at their mercy and have less actual control than we think. But what’s even better is that once we know how they work, we can turn these unconscious forces to our own advantage.
Decades of laboratory research as well as practical demonstrations in real-life settings have revealed the power of conscious “implementation intentions.” How do they work?
They often take the form of “When X happens, I will do Y.” You make a clear, concrete plan that includes where, when, and how you will carry out the intention. You tie your desired future behavior to a highly likely event or situation. Then when that future event actually happens, you will more often than not find yourself starting to do the very thing you wanted to do, even if you’d forgotten you wanted to do it.

This essay is adapted from Before You Know It: The Unconscious Reasons We Do What We Do (Touchstone, 2017, 352 pages).

I used this technique myself to block the carryover effects of a bad day at work. First, I set an intention—to let go of the negative stresses of work when I get home and show my family I am happy to be with them. Then, I came up with an implementation plan, which I tied to a reliable future event: The moment when I get out of my car after driving home from work, and am standing in my driveway (that’s the when and where), I remind myself to take a deep breath, forget all about the office, and be happy to be home with my family (that’s the how). After I did this for about a week, it started to become a new habit that I carry on to this day.
Or, what if you want to start exercising, but keep forgetting to? One idea is to make an implementation intention: When you go into your bedroom (that’s the where) to change out of your work clothes, you will immediately put on your running clothes and shoes (that’s the how). Once you do that, you’d look pretty silly if you didn’t go out for a run, right? 


Implementation intentions have had great practical success, such as helping nursing home residents to take their many medications, on which their lives can depend, without fail over a long period of time. And they’ve helped people to keep on track with their goals, even when facing interruptions or negative influence from others.
The other side of the same coin works for unwanted behaviors. The latest research on self-control has actually shown that people who have the most self-control—who in fact tend to be happier and healthier, make more money, have more friends, and be more successful in life than the rest of us—are not those with the strongest willpower. They are those who set up their personal worlds to remove cues to unwanted behaviors, preventing the temptation from happening in the first place. So, just don’t buy that bottle of wine or yummy dessert. It won’t be there at home in the evening to tempt you. 
This trick can also work at the societal level. Self-control researcher Wendy Wood has pointed out that the great reduction in smoking that we have achieved over the past 30 years was accomplished not through people using willpower, but mainly through smoking bans, taxes, eliminating cigarette and tobacco ads from TV and magazines, and forbidding cigarette displays in stores. Getting rid of the environmental cues to smoke helped those who wanted to quit far more than other factors.
This new scientific evidence should give us hope. If we want to increase good habits, we can tie them to a regular place and time and give ourselves reminders to prime our unconscious mind to support these habits. If we want to rid ourselves of certain habits, we can remove cues and opportunities from our environment, and replace our unconscious impulses with positive, conscious messages.
In this way, we can use the power of our unconscious mind for good…and have a much better chance of keeping those New Year’s resolutions.

The Science of the Story

Jeremy Adam Smith

UC Berkeley

 We know in our gut when we’re hearing a good story—and research is starting to explain why. 

 Stories are told in the body.

It doesn’t seem that way. We tend to think of stories as emerging from consciousness—from dreams or fantasies—and traveling through words or images to other minds. We see them outside of us, on paper or on screen, never under the skin.

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But we do feel stories. We know in our gut when we’re hearing a good one—and science is starting to explain why.
Experiencing a story alters our neurochemical processes, and stories are a powerful force in shaping human behavior. In this way, stories are not just instruments of connection and entertainment but also of control.
We don’t need the science of storytelling to tell a story. We do, however, need science if we want to understand the roots of our storytelling instinct and how tales shape beliefs and behavior, often below conscious awareness. As we’ll discuss, science can help us to defend ourselves in a world where people are constantly trying to push our buttons with the stories they tell.
The better we understand how stories unfold in our bodies, the more equipped we are to thrive in the story-rich environment of the twenty-first century.

Punched in the gut

Imagine your attention as a spotlight. When someone tells you a story, they are attempting to control that spotlight. They are manipulating you.
We all do this every day, all the time. You try to hold attention as you tell a story to coworkers over coffee; I’m trying to hold your attention as I tell the story of the science of storytelling.
There are many different ways to draw the spotlight of other people’s attention—and all of them instinctively or deliberately tap into basic human drives. Here, for example, is a very short story attributed to Ernest Hemingway.

For Sale: Baby shoes, never worn.

How does this story make you feel? I can speak for myself: When I first encountered it as an undergraduate, my attention was instantly captured. And when I realized, after a beat, what it meant, I felt punched in the gut.
The story works because it triggers our natural negativity bias—that is, the hardwired human tendency to focus on the bad, threatening, dangerous things in life. It specifically activates the fear and despair we’d feel if our child died, even if we don’t yet have one of our own.
We’re really good at focusing the spotlight of our attention on what might hurt us—or hurt those close to us, especially our children. What happens in our bodies when we throw the spotlight on a threat? We get stressed out.
And what’s stress? That’s a tool nature gave us to survive lion attacks—in other words, stress mobilizes our body’s resources to survive an immediate physical threat. Adrenaline pumps and our bodies release the hormone cortisol, sharpening our attention and boosting our strength and speed.
But unlike other animals, humans have the gift and the curse of being susceptible to stress even when we don’t face a direct physical threat. This we do by telling ourselves, and each other, stories. They are the best way we have to communicate potential threats to other humans—and help each other to prepare for overcoming those threats.
Most of us will never face a flesh-and-blood lion, yet in stories we transform lions into potent symbols of beautiful death. That’s the essence of many stories: facing and overcoming dangers, which will persist, multiply, and mutate in our minds and, in some cases, become metaphors for more-immediate dangers. 
As Neil Gaiman writes in his novel Coraline: “Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”
When someone starts a story with a dragon, they’re harnessing negativity bias and manipulating the stress response, whether they intend to or not. We’re attracted to stressful stories because we are always afraid that it could happen to us, whatever “it” is—and we want to imagine how we would deal with all the many kinds of dragons that could rear up in our lives, from family strife to layoffs to crime.
But we don’t necessarily need dragons to capture attention, right? At the very beginning of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, she slowly introduces us to a babe, alone in the world, under constant threat. We instinctively take the side of the “boy who lived” because at the beginning of the story, he’s so vulnerable.
Most of the Star Wars films take another approach, by trying to inspire a sense of awe—the emotional reaction to something so vast we can’t immediately grasp it—which research shows triggers behaviors associated with curiosity, like turning to other people for answers.

How stories unfold in our bodies

While authors can capture our attention in many different ways, sooner or later a villain will appear and a conflict will develop. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone may start gently, but Lord Voldemort looms in the background. As the action rises and Harry’s society of witches and wizards slides toward civil war, our attention sharpens and our bodies release more cortisol. If that doesn’t happen, a story loses us. Our spotlight turns to something else.
But cortisol alone isn’t enough to keep our bodies engaged with a story. The conflicts in Harry Potter and Star Wars grab our attention—and the settings can inspire awe and wonder—but they wouldn’t involve us nearly as much if they didn’t also include characters we come to care about.
As we see fictional characters interact, our bodies tend to release a neuropeptide called oxytocin, which scientists first found in nursing mothers. Oxytocin has subsequently turned up in studies of couples and group-bonding—indeed, we find oxytocin whenever humans feel close to each other, or even just imagine being close. That’s why stories trigger oxytocin: When Princess Leia finally told Han Solo that she loves him in The Empire Strikes Back, your body almost certainly released at least a trace level.

That’s not all that’s happening as we become involved in a story and its characters. The brain activity of both storytellers and story listeners starts to align thanks to mirror neurons, brain cells that fire not only when we perform an action but when we observe someone else perform the same action. As we become involved with a story, fictional things come to seem real in our bodies. The storyteller describes a delicious meal and the listener’s mouth can start to water. When the characters in the story feel sad, the listener’s left prefrontal cortex activates, suggesting that they feel sad as well.
As the plot thickens, the good author pushes the characters we care about into conflict with the villain. Our palms sweat, we grip the hand of the person next to us—who is likely having the same reaction. We might feel the tension in our neck. Our body is braced for a threat, but the threat is completely imaginary.
That’s when the storytelling miracle comes to pass: As the cortisol that feeds attention mixes with the oxytocin of care, we experience a phenomenon called “transportation.” Transportation happens when attention and anxiety join with our empathy.
In other words, we’re hooked. For the duration of the story, our fates become intertwined with those of imaginary people. If the story has a happy ending, it triggers the limbic system, the brain’s reward center, to release dopamine. We might be overcome by a feeling of optimism—the same one characters are experiencing on the page or screen.
Where do we end and where does the story begin? With the most intense, involving stories, it’s hard to tell.

How stories bring people together

At the beginning of the series, Harry Potter is extremely vulnerable. This inspires protectiveness in the reader.

Why in the world would evolution grant us this ability? Why would nature actually make us crave stories and make transportation a pleasurable experience?
I’ve already suggested part of the answer: We need to know about problems and how to solve them, which can enhance our survival as individuals and as a species. Without a problem for the characters to solve, there is no story.
But there might be other reasons. Recent research suggests that this process of transportation in fiction actually increases our real-life empathic skills. Studies published in 2013 and 2015 exposed people to literary fiction or high-quality TV—and then gave them the “mind in the eyes” test, in which participants look at letterboxed images of eyes and try to identify the emotion behind them. In the 2015 study, participants who watched Mad Men or The Good Wife scored significantly higher than did those who watched documentaries or simply took the test without first watching anything.
In other words, the empathic skills we build with stories are transferrable to the rest of our lives: They are advantageous in real-world situations where it helps to have insight into what another person is thinking or feeling—situations like negotiating a deal, sizing up a potential enemy, or understanding what our lover wants.
All these qualities make stories adaptive, in evolutionary terms. They’re not just nice to hear. They can actually increase our chances of survival.

How stories change behavior

Research finds that stories shape our behavior in other ways that can help us to thrive.
Study after study after study finds that stories are far more persuasive than just stating the facts. For example, one found that a storytelling approach was more effective in convincing African-Americans at risk for hypertension to change their behavior and reduce their blood pressure. A study of low-performing science students found that reading stories of the struggles of famous scientists led to better grades. A paper published last year found that witnessing acts of altruism and heroism in films led to more giving in real life.
Indeed, stories actually seem to trigger the neurochemical processes that make certain kinds of resource-sharing possible. This biological activity can lead to profound behavioral changes, including costly acts of altruism.
When Claremont Graduate University economist Paul Zak and colleagues showed a dramatic film of a father and son struggling with cancer, they found that both cortisol and oxytocin spiked in nearly all of the viewers—and that most of them donated a portion of their earnings from the experiment to nonprofits. This didn’t happen in participants who watched a simple film of the father and son wandering around a zoo. In fact, the researchers found that the more cortisol and oxytocin released, the more likely participants were to make charitable donations—and in one experiment, Zak found that hormone levels predicted donations with 80 percent accuracy.

This is the neurochemical process that makes fundraising and taxes possible—and inspires people to mobilize large-scale support for enterprises like political campaigns, churches, universities, libraries, or, for that matter, the United States as a nation. Stories enable us to form relationships with strangers and ask them to make small sacrifices for something that is larger than themselves.
I picked Star Wars and Harry Potter as examples because those are “master narratives” that have been embraced by, without exaggeration, billions of people. There’s something awe-inspiring about the idea that those stories have changed so many people right down to the molecular level, all of them together feeling that spike of cortisol when Darth Vader appears or that soothing flow of oxytocin when Hermione throws her arms around Ron after they escape some Death Eaters, our bodies resonating with each other across time and distance. These global narratives don’t just entertain; they also impart ideals of heroism, compassion, and self-sacrifice.

The dark side of storytelling

But this process has a dark side. Darth Vader and Lord Voldemort do not exist in our world, but there are certainly people who wish us harm—and, as the story of Anakin Skywalker so well reveals, there’s a shadow-self inside all of us that is capable of wishing harm on someone else.
A spike in cortisol can make us aggressive—one half of the “fight-or-flight” response we hear so much about—and oxytocin has been implicated in competition between groups. People dosed with oxytocin in the lab show strong preferences for their own in-groups, however defined, from school bands to fraternities. Oxytocin appears to play a role in trying to take what out-groups have. People dosed with oxytocin are also more likely to indulge in group-think—going along with collective decisions even when they believe those decisions are wrong.
In short, stories form groups, a process enabled by oxytocin. It is no accident that communities—fandoms—have sprung up around Harry Potter and Star Wars, sometimes in (mostly) playful competition with each other. It’s harmless fun for fans, but not all stories are as benign as these, in intent or outcomes. Stories can carry us toward ideals that are destructive, especially to out-groups. Stories are a form of power over bodies, but it’s a power that we can use or misuse.
Take a look at this video, below, contrasting the speeches of two political leaders—both expert communicators—about the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima. And as you watch the video, think about their intentions. What emotions are they aiming to stir in their audiences? What kind of emotions do they trigger in you?

I’m not trying (here, at least) to tell you who to vote for in November. But given the power of stories, it’s dangerous to hear them without asking ourselves what reactions they are triggering in our bodies. Mr. Trump’s speech causes my stomach to clench and my mouth to go dry; in asking me to put my own group ahead of others, he triggers anger and anxiety. I believe that’s his intent. President Obama’s speech urges me to reflect and to think compassionately about all of humanity. His words lift my heart, just a bit—and, again, I believe that’s intentional.
I can feel their words in my body, but I’m not helpless against them. Research also suggests that people are more than capable of defending themselves against the power of stories. We can cognitively override the emotional identification and transportation stories trigger by trying to balance them against the facts. In cultivating awareness of the impact of a story, we can tell a different one, or revise the story to fit the facts or our own experience. We live in an story-saturated world—coming at us through screens as well as through pages and performances and music—and today, I think it’s essential for us to understand all the ways in which leaders and organizations are trying to manipulate us into believing what they want us to believe.
A lot of psychotherapy these days involves getting people to pay attention to the stories they tell themselves. In therapy, we are told to ask ourselves: Am I telling myself a story that helps me to grow and flourish, or is it one that diminishes my life’s possibilities? We need to do the same to stories other people tell us.
More than that, we need to look at our own responsibility for the well-being of others, and cultivate awareness of the impact of our own stories, of our own power over the bodies of other people. What intentions do we bring to the stories we tell? Are we using our power to lift people up and help them to see solutions to the problems we face as individuals and as groups? Or are we using our power to reveal the worst in ourselves, and so pit people against each other? Do we communicate things that make us feel good about ourselves—or that make us feel worse?
Stories bring us together, but they can also tear us apart. They can bring us joy but they can also incite hatred. We are all born with the power to tell stories. It’s a power we need to learn to use well and wisely.
This essay is based on a talk for the Berkeley Communications Conference, delivered on June 1, 2016.
Original text : https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/science_of_the_story