Emily Falk

So if we're on a team where we never give each other feedback, and then all of a sudden I come to you and I say, Shankar, I've got some feedback for you, it might loom very large or massive.

really elicit defensiveness in a bigger way than if we have the norm that at the beginning of our meetings, we check in about things that are going well and places where we want to potentially make changes.

And so the kind of context setup, I think, is important that Laura Lee's story reflects.

And then in terms of the words that we use, there's broader kind of categories, I think, psychologically.

So we've talked a lot about how taking a step back, getting some psychological distance can be helpful.

And there's a lot of research about how stories help reduce defensiveness.

So that's not at the word level, but rather the kind of packaging of information.

And both the psychology and neuroscience literature highlight that.

how powerful stories can be in helping people learn lessons or see things from a new perspective without getting defensive, and also the anthropology literature.

So, for example, a lot of cultures around the world use stories as a way to give feedback to kids or to other people about how we should behave.

In our brains, stories are processed differently than other kinds of information.

So they tap into brain regions that help us think about what other people think and feel, for example.

And they seem to circumvent the kind of defensive processing that comes, as you said, if you just directly tell somebody to change their behavior.

And we've seen this in lots of different examples.

During the COVID pandemic, for example, my team did some research looking at people's willingness to help others in their community or change their behavior.

And what we found was that when the same exact information was delivered just in terms of facts, you know, the number of people who are being affected and how frontline health care workers were suffering because of the behaviors that we were engaging in,

that landed differently than when the exact same information was delivered through stories, for example, of frontline health workers or people who were incarcerated, people whose circumstances made it so that they couldn't take the kinds of preventative actions for the spread of the virus.

And in other neuroscience research that we've done, we found that when we use brain stimulation technology that changes the way that people's brains are functioning temporarily,

Right.

Right.