What makes humans human? The scientific definition — Homo sapiens, literally meaning “wise man” — places intellect and thinking front and center in defining our species. Jonathan Gottschall believes that’s a somewhat limiting perspective. He proposes Homo fictus — “storytelling man” — as an equally accurate defining construct.
“There’s an old debate among scientists and scholars and philosophers about what makes us us — what is it that really sets us apart,” said Gottschall, author of The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012) and an English teacher at Washington & Jefferson College in Pennsylvania. “The most 
common argument is it's our wisdom, our intelligence, our huge, huge brains. Other philosophers say no, it's really not that. In this long argument about what makes us most special, one thing is typically left off the list and that's the way that human beings live their lives inside stories.”
Gottschall’s book draws on biology, psychology, and neuroscience to offer a unified theory of the evolution of storytelling. As he explains in the preface, “Our penchant for story has evolved, like other behaviors, to enhance our survival and, crucially, that of our social group.”
The book examines how stories saturate and shape our lives, from TV commercials to daydreams. It also shines a spotlight on the power and influence of stories to shape thinking and behavior — something every good salesperson and marketer understands.
This is the first excerpt from a dialogue between Gottschall and Travel Weekly PLUS Editor in Chief Diane Merlino about the implications of storytelling in business and marketing.
Merlino: A core idea in your book is that stories are as important as genes, and rather than being time wasters, they're actually evolutionary innovations.
Gottschall: Just think about your own day and how much time you spend in storyland. Children play in stories. You dream at night in stories. We consume a huge amount of storytelling on TV, in films, on our smartphones, in video games and popular songs, and on and on and on. Humans basically live inside stories and that's weird from an evolutionary point of view because it's not obvious what the benefit of it is.
If you see an animal eating something or having sex, it's obvious in evolutionary terms why they're doing it; it helps them pass on genes. Storytelling is a bit of an evolutionary mystery, and the book is partly about trying to explain that mystery, trying to explain why story evolved and why we've become storytelling animals.
Merlino: You’ve said that we're all competing in the attention economy, an idea that’s key to the importance of storytelling in business and other realms. What do you mean by the attention economy?
Gottschall: You could call attention the scarcest resource on earth. There’s precious little of it, and everybody wants more, so there's a supply and demand problem: There's a very limited supply of human attention and massive demand for it. Secondly, our attention spans are all fractured up.
What I mean by the attention economy is that marketplace where we're all competing to earn each other's attention. Businesses need consumers to pay attention to them. Writers like me need audiences to pay attention to them. And people at work need others to pay attention to them if they're going to have any influence, any power.
Merlino: Within that framework of a marketplace where everybody is competing for attention, how do your ideas about human beings as storytelling animals apply in the business world?
Gottschall: Let’s go back to attention for just one moment. There's not enough of it to go around, and it's all shattered up and scattered around. The average person has something like — and this is amazing — 2,000 daydreams per day. They last about 14 seconds on average and it comes to about eight solid hours of daydreaming per day. It's really an astonishing number.
What that means is that the mind is all over the place all of the time. If you think about it, the biggest challenge in the attention economy is: How do you pin down the wondering mind, how do you counter the tendency of the mind to walk away from what you're trying to show it? The only thing that reliably does this is story.
In ordinary, waking life you have more than 100 daydreams per waking hour. But when you're absorbed in storyland, when you're watching your favorite TV show or reading a good novel, you experience zero daydreams per hour — none at all. The mind goes utterly still, it pays rapt attention, and it can do so for hours on end. Nothing else in human life accomplishes that.
Merlino: What are the implications for marketing and advertising?
Gottschall: Marketing and advertising come down to competition in the attention economy. Marketers have known for a long time that they need to be good storytellers. A lot of them have, but it's crystalized in recent years that in order to get and hold people's attention, in order to get them to do the things you want them to do, you need to be an excellent storyteller.
So, it's not just that stories are good at claiming attention; they're also really good then at getting people to do what the storyteller wants them to do.
Merlino: Why are stories good at getting people to do things?
Gottschall: We're extremely gullible when we're in storyland. Let’s say you're a Coke executive and you say, “Hey, buy my product. It tastes better. It's got better ingredients.” If you just lay out an argument, I'm going to be skeptical. I'm going to be critical. I'm going to get my defenses up. I know you're a marketer, and I know you're trying to persuade me.
But if you tell me a really good story that drives home that same message without a heavy-handed argument, my defenses evaporate. I let my guard down, and I'm very easy for you to mold and manipulate. Story is so powerful in business settings and marketing settings — in any sort of persuasion setting — because it gets our attention. And once the storyteller has your attention they're able to use it to mold your behavior.
Merlino: Do you have any favorite examples of a story-based ad campaign?
Gottschall: Some of my favorites, just because they make me laugh, are the Jack Links beef jerky TV ads. The ad campaign is called Messin’ with Sasquatch and it’s basically about this kind of helpless, nice guy Big Foot monster who keeps coming into contact with these really immature jerky guys. The story is always about these dumb villains teasing the Sasquatch mercilessly for no good reason, and then the Sasquatch turns the tables on them.
What’s critical about this ad campaign is that the ads say nothing about the product in question — not a damn thing. They don't have a pitchman come out and say, “Hey, try our beef jerky. It’s delicious and it's wholesome.” They know that doesn't work very well. Instead they just tell the coolest, funniest stories and establish positive emotional connections with their product. The product is in the ads but it’s there as product placement, like a Coke can would be in the background of a sitcom episode.
Merlino: Was the ad campaign successful?
Gottschall: This ad campaign worked big time because the stories were so good. They were really funny. People spread them around their social networks, and they were watched millions of times on YouTube. The campaign was largely responsible for making Jack Links a household brand.
Merlino: That sounds like a really fun ad campaign. It also illustrates something you’ve said about stories that surprised me — that they aren’t idyllic and tend to include a lot of chaos and trouble.
Gottschall: That’s absolutely right. Whether consciously or unconsciously, the Jack Links ads are tapping into an 
ancient and universal structure of storytelling. It’s a master formula for creating stories and it is really very simple: It comes down to trouble.
You put a character in a story, you give the character some difficult problem, some sort of trouble, and the character has to solve the trouble. This holds true just as much for a folktale as a story by a kid or a dream or a great novel by Tolstoy or a Jack Links beef jerky ad. Stories have to be trouble-focused or no one's interested.
Merlino: Jonathan, right off the top of your head, can you come up with a way this trouble-solving story could work for a hotel company or a cruise line?
Gottschall: One thing marketers struggle with is that a lot of brands don't want conflict in their ads because they don’t want to raise any sort of negative associations. They want things to be sunny, they want to show people on a Carnival Cruise ship soaking up the sun and having a good time. They don't want to show a problem narrative.
But it's easy to imagine a narrative for Carnival Cruise line where Carnival solves your problems of overwork, your problems of stress, your marital problems, your problems with your kids — a Carnival cruise is heroically the solution to these problems. It’s not quite that easy. I just described a pretty corny commercial, right?
Merlino: Well, not necessarily. Depends on how they did it.
Gottschall: But that’s the way marketers work. Marketers give you a problem narrative like that, then show you how the problem is going to be solved by their product. That's the classic way of doing it. I think the storytellers have to be more clever now because we’ve worked up immunity to those sorts of stories. The beef jerky guys were much more clever about the way they approached their storytelling in that classic, somewhat corny problem/solution narrative.
COMING UP: More from Jonathan Gottschall on the emotional impact of stories and their use in the business world.