Narrative paradigm

Overview

"Narrative paradigm" refers to a conceptual communication model that attempts to account for how people come to understand the moral and ethical dimension of the real world. More than an abstract theory about how communication is supposed to work or some classroom template that is not designed to apply to real-world situations, the narrative paradigm seeks to provide nothing less than a way not only to perceive the day to day world but also how a person is to live within that world in a manner that is consistent with the community good. Although people use communication skills (specifically writing and speaking) to recount pedestrian day to day events to others and to engage in otherwise casual conversations, the premise behind the narrative paradigm model is that all critical communication is designed to have an impact—a person talks or writes to make an impression on an audience, specifically to cause a change in behavior and/or perception whether in a listener or a reader.

People do not communicate in a vacuum nor do they communicate for the simple pleasure of the expression itself. Communication is designed to engage others. Communication is conceived as a strategy for changing people to act in ways beneficial to themselves and to the larger community. Thus, people are driven to communicate as a strategy for creating a communal bond, a community; any nation, any culture is simply an environment of agreement and collective thought.

For more than two thousand years, dating to antiquity and the rhetorical theories of the ancient Greeks (most notably Aristotle), the assumption has been that communication designed to impact people must rest on logic, that right-thinking people would be persuaded by clear and clean lines of argument. Rhetoric itself was conceived as a study of what language skills best convince, how to make the most airtight and most convincing arguments. People, it was assumed, ultimately were persuaded by data, by expertise, by reason. Whether in a court of law or a political campaign, whether in a church or around a family dinner, the highest expression of communication relied on the rational faculty. An attorney attempting to sway a jury, a politician seeking votes, an advertising executive trying to sell dog food, a pastor convincing a congregation to reject sin, a parent struggling to convince a reluctant child to complete homework on time, whatever the communication situation, the audience is most effectively handled by the presentation of evidence in support of a premise; a person is best persuaded by the appeal to the intellect, by hard data shaped into a convincing argument.

But is the intellect itself the best vehicle for effective communication? Consider the scenario of a parent confronting an adolescent who considering leaving school. Would that child be more convinced by the parent presenting flip charts with hard data on student dropout rates or by a shared story about an uncle who had dropped out and was now struggling to find gainful employment? Or consider the challenge of a company that produces dog food that wants to embark on a new advertising campaign, perhaps the most direct example of communication intended to prompt agreement and action (Stutts & Barker, 2016). What better convinces a potential dog food buyer: a twenty minute infomercial that offers irrefutable scientific analysis of the benefits of the dog food's components or a thirty second commercial that begins with a despondent dog with mopey eyes and its owner deciding to try the client's dog food and that ends with the now happy dog, frisky and energized, leaping into the owner's lap? Advertisers understand the importance of narrative and its use, for example, in the development of a brand.

So, what better completes the communication loop, what has more impact: data or stories? What better convinces: credentialed expertise or convincing events, whether invented or real-life? Which is more trustworthy: the cool intellect or the compassionate heart? From Aesop's fables to Disney's animated classics, from the wisdom parables of ancient religions to the adventures of Harry Potter, from the dramas of the ancient Greeks to contemporary news documentaries, stories and storytelling have existed really as long as language itself; but stories have long been regarded as affective, emotionally enthralling, even charming—but hardly data. For centuries, stories have been held suspect in the public arena. Stories were at best pleasant distractions, engaging, perhaps, but hardly reliable and convincing as the basis for any critical life decisions, from who to vote for, whether to convict or acquit, who to marry, or even what car to buy.

A radical reinvestigation of the impact of narrative, however, began in the late 1980s directed largely by the maverick arguments of a single influential academic: Walter R. Fisher, who for more than thirty years was on the faculty of the Annenberg School of Communication of the University of Southern California. For Fisher, the world of communication was an entangling network not of data and facts but rather of stories, never-ending and inexhaustible. The world, at least as conceived by language, was a world of stories and storytelling. Sharing narratives—storylines with believable characters in believable settings, clear conflicts, sequential events bound by causality, suggestive symbols, and moving ultimately toward some profound meaning—was the heart, really the core of all significant and consequential communication. For Fisher, as he argued in Communication Monographs in 1984, storytelling was certainly an art, like painting an aesthetic expression, but unlike representational art narrative nevertheless had a compelling persuasive imperative. To understand experience, whether an individual person's life story or the grand events of history or the defining elements of a culture or civilization, Fisher argued, is to open the mind and heart to the stories of those experiences and to allow those stories, in turn, to shape the moral and ethical profile of the individuals who hear (or read) the stories. In short, people learn far more from stories than data and expertise; people are persuaded more completely and far more compellingly when the heart is engaged as well as the intellect. Fisher's was a radical conception of communication that dismissed nearly two millennia of assumptions about how the mind engages language and positioned storytelling, not reason, at the heart of effective communication processes.

Applications

Life as it turned out was not a courtroom. The mind was not bound to be moved by the most compelling presentation of evidence and in turn make inevitable a logical verdict, a decision that manifested reason. It is not that people are unreasonable or their actions unpredictable and irresponsible. Rather the human mind interprets events with the assistance of personal experience and much common sense to be moved, rather than directed, to wisdom and insight. After all, evidence, such as data and statistics can be confusing; indeed, numbers can be made to indicate exactly opposite conclusions. Within the narrative paradigm, however, there exists within the individual an uncanny ability to discern right-thinking from the stuff of a narrative. Fisher himself argued in 1985 that relying on the rational paradigm diminished people by relegating decision-making to experts. For those who endorse the value and validity of the rational paradigm, that is how the careful and studied presentation of hard data is critical in persuading an audience to a course of action, the world at large is really nothing more than a series of temporarily perplexing problems that with the application of reason and sufficient time can ultimately be resolved, that the world can be eventually constructed into a utopian community of right thinking people now convinced by the evidence of the validity of certain actions that will sustain and preserve rather than upend and destroy that community.

The narrative paradigm resists such grandiose schemes as naïve. Rather, an individual, whose life is composed entirely of stories that have become memories, makes the best possible life decisions compelled by their own stories or by the stories they are given of others' experiences. People will be moved to preserve virtue and be humane and follow the highest moral behavior not because of statistics and clever arguments but because in their heart they respond to the integrity and validity of characters and their stories. A person is more likely to not drink and drive not because of a pamphlet that lists the disturbing statistics on drunk driving and its consequences but because they meet and/or read the heartbreaking story of a parent who lost a child to a drunk driving accident. Indeed, Caldiero (2007) applied Fisher's paradigm to news coverage following three traumatic national events: the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, the bombing of the federal office building in Oklahoma City, and the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Caldiero concluded the country worked through its collective trauma through the generous testimony of eyewitnesses and those most impacted by the events, not through the rhetoric of politicians and news wonks.

Not every story convinces, of course. From the beginning, Fisher defined two critical characteristics that make a story valid and, in turn, useful as a communication medium: coherence and fidelity. To be useful, the story as told must maintain a careful and believable structure. To be convincing, a story cannot indulge the fabulous or the fantastic or even the unexpected; characters cannot act suddenly in ways that contradict their established character. The accepted laws of physics need to be sustained. This marginalizes works of the fantastic—such exotic stories engage and entertain but they are not seminal in a person's life decisions. In addition, the narrative must maintain a credible fidelity to the world of experiences in which the reader/listener lives, and the story must be true to that dimension of experience. If the story is both coherent and credible, that story becomes a powerful tool for communication, a tool that compels right behavior in a person and, in turn, creates a humane and compassionate community, whether a family, a neighborhood, a congregation, or a nation. Indeed, according to the narrative paradigm, any nation is really a weave of stories, its history as well as its identity shaped by a vast canon of iconic narratives that not only define it but also create whatever sense of community it possesses.

Viewpoints

Fisher's narrative paradigm quickly became among the most controversial communication models of the late twentieth century. Critics rejected the idea of storytelling as a communications model because Fisher's model assumes that good will compel good, that bad will repel, that a person is capable of assessing a narrative and to discern from its events a reliable moral reading. First, critics argued, the system offered no reliable quantitative way to measure its implications; after all, determining the credibility of a story rests entirely with the person receiving the story. That person believes in ghosts; that person is paranoid; that person is profoundly religious; that person is highly educated; if the credibility of a story is left entirely to the profile of the audience then the world collapses into moral and ethical relativism that the rational paradigm sees as chaos.

More to the point, at the heart of the narrative paradigm is the assumption that a person will respond to a narrative with intuitive goodness, that a person will reject a story that endorses wrong behavior. Yet, cultural historians point to examples in which inflammatory narratives have indeed driven a culture to wrong behavior (e.g., the German population in the 1920s to Hitler's anti-Semitic screeds, whites in the American South in the late nineteenth century who collectively endorsed Jim Crow legislation in response to racist anecdotes and cultural myths). For critics, the narrative paradigm is attractive, but too simplistic in its assumptions about communications and about the workings of the intellect and the emotions. For critics, stories are by their very nature unreliable and given to individual interpretation. Buying a particular kind of dog food simply because the dog in a commercial appears to end up happy is dangerously thin logic if extended to far more critical life decisions such as who to vote for, who to marry, what career to pursue, what religion to follow.

Advocates, however, point out that Fisher's narrative paradigm works with the mind as it actually operates. Experience confirms that stories do carry unsuspected weight, they do persuade and logic does not solely direct decisions or compel actions. A person's life, a person's family histories, a person's community, a person's country and its history are all shaped and created by a vast archive of stories that become the defining identity of the person and in turn create the cohesive community that ultimately shapes that person's life and actions.

Bibliography

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Bock, M. A., & Schneider, D. A. (2017). The voice of lived experience: Mobile video narratives in the courtroom. Information, Communication & Society, 20(3), 335–350. doi:10.1080/1369118X.2016.1168474

Brady, D. (2016). Theory synthesis: A narrative theory for nursing pedagogy. Nursing Research, 65(2), E77–E78. Retrieved May 23, 2018 from EBSCO Online Database Academic Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=asn&AN=113905356&site=ehost-live

Burns, M. E. (2015). Recruiting prospective students with stories: How personal stories influence the process of choosing a university. Communication Quarterly, 63(1), 99–118. doi:10.1080/01463373.2014.965838

Caldiero, C. (2007). Crisis storytelling: Fisher's narrative paradigm and news reporting. American Communication Journal, 9(1).

Coker, C. (2017). Romney, Obama, and the 47%: Gaffes and representative anecdotes in the 2012 presidential campaign. Argumentation & Advocacy, 53(4), 327–343. doi:10.1080/00028533.2017.1375759

Jaaskelainen, I. (2020, June 26). Neural processing of narratives: From individual processing to viral propagation. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2020.00253

Stutts, N. B., & Barker, R. T. (2016). The use of narrative paradigm theory in assessing audience value conflict in image advertising. Management Communication Quarterly, 13(2): 209–244. doi:10.1177/0893318999132002