This article was previously publised here: Texas Lawyer (July 23, 2020)
Oftentimes, people tell stories haphazardly, just for the fun of it. But as trial lawyers, we have to purposefully tell our clients’ stories to the jury or the judge so they can understand the truth about what happened, writes Charles “Chuck” Bennett, a consultant with Trial Structure.
Earlier this year in the middle of the pandemic, I was preparing for a Zoom hearing before a judge on a complicated and arcane arbitration issue, trying to decide how to proceed. How can I get the judge to understand how the arbitration agreement, the arbitration tribunal’s rules, and the case law all fit together? Will the judge “get it” over the online Zoom forum? Then I remembered what I always tell my consulting clients: “If you want your audience to understand something, tell it to them in story.”
Stories allowed our ancestors to express their emotions and beliefs in a way that both entertained and offered explanations to life’s great mysteries. Despite rapid advances in our modern world, and even pandemics, that seem to increasingly isolate us, we are still social creatures that want to form connections, share our emotions, and feel a sense of belonging. In a world dominated by impersonal emails, messages, and online hearings, people underestimate the communicative power that a clear and well-developed story holds.
Although it is abundantly clear that people like stories, what is directly happening in our brains while sharing and listening to stories has never been well understood. In 2010, researchers at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute tried to find out. One of the researchers told an unrehearsed real-life story about her crazy prom experience inside a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine that then produced an image of her brain activity while telling that story.
Afterward, she put several students into the fMRI machine and had them listen to a recording of her telling the story, so an image of their brains was produced of them listening. And later, when the students recounted as much of the story as they could remember, they were scored on their comprehension.
When the fMRI images of the speaker’s and students’ brains were compared, the students’ brains mirrored the speaker’s brain. Meaning, the active parts of the students’ brains listening to the story were the same as the active parts of the speaker’s brain, but with a delay of 1 to 3 seconds.
The researchers suggest this short delay is consistent with the time it takes for information to flow from the speaker’s brain and be comprehended in the listener’s brain. Overall, the brain mirroring with delay implies a process by which a speaker’s story can “induce and shape the neural responses in the listener’s brain.” But for storytellers it means, “slow down so the listener can keep up!”
Amazingly though, some parts of the listeners’ brains actually became active before the speaker’s brain, as the listener tried to anticipate and predict the story. The extent of the listener’s ability to anticipate what was going to come next in the story was closely related to their level of understanding and comprehension, suggesting that two key requirements of telling an effective story are (1) making the direction of the story easier to predict and (2) actively engaging the listener.
Finally, there was a strong positive correlation between the comprehension level of the listener and how well the listener’s brain activity mirrored the brain activity of the speaker. The more closely the listener’s brain mirrored the storyteller’s, the better the listener’s comprehension. Nick Morgan, a communication theorist and a speaker on storytelling, would likely say this research supports his belief that a clear story that conveys the depth and focus of the speaker’s emotion “can bridge the undeniable difference among humans.”
Oftentimes, people tell stories haphazardly, just for the fun of it. But as trial lawyers, we have to purposefully tell our clients’ stories to the jury or the judge so they can understand the truth about what happened. We have to think about what we want to say, how to say it, and what effect we want it to have on the listener. The meaning of communication is the response that you get. And that even applies over online hearings on Zoom or a similar platform.
So in that Zoom hearing before the judge I told a story about what companies like this defendant know when they decide to force their employees into arbitration agreements. They know they have to follow the arbitration tribunal’s rules, even if the tribunal’s rules are contradicted by the agreement the company writes. That it’s never enough for the companies to say, “But our agreement says we don’t have to pay for the arbitration,” because when companies choose to go to arbitration, they choose to be bound by the tribunal’s rules. When I finished my argument (story), the judge looked to the defense with skepticism and asked very pointed questions. I could tell the judge got it, and we won with a very favorable ruling a few days later. Stories work on human levels even if the story is told online, and ultimately all litigation involves human interactions.
