Drawing on the Power of Narrative Structure to Compete with Fake News

Getting people to buy into scientific content is an uphill task. The content and narrative, after all, is not very engaging for most people, and those in charge of sharing it don’t do so in a manner that draws in lay audiences. This was never more underscored than during the COVID-19 pandemic, where fake news and conspiracy theories enthralled the masses. 

But why does scientific truth not capture enough attention? Why does science communication fail where fake news succeeds?

We turned to Randy Olson, marine biologist-turned-filmmaker, for answers. Randy has authored several books that marry his scientific knowledge to the power of narrative structure that the business and entertainment communities understand so well. He has written and directed short films and documentaries that draw on his science background, and published ten books on the communication of science and other information-heavy disciplines. In December 2021, we spoke to Randy about science communication in the pandemic, where things went wrong, and what we can learn from the business and entertainment communities. 

This online interview, conducted over 2 hours, has been edited for length and clarity.  

Randy, you have been a scientist, a marine biologist to be precise. You then made the switch to filmmaking. You’ve seen how science is communicated and you understand how content can be made engaging. Can you explain why misinformation gets more traction than scientific information? Is it more interesting or engaging than the latter?  

 It is all about the power of narrative structure. For over a century the business and entertainment communities have drawn on this power to engage and even lead the general public. But when the pandemic hit, the science community failed to seek their expertise, with tragic results.  Fake news stories like “the pandemic being created by the capitalists or evil pharmaceutical companies for profit or as a chemical weapon by some nation” proliferated as the science community stood helpless.

This disaster in the United States – and globally – around the pandemic is not new. I began studying science in the 1970s. The anti-science movement – which is how we might label this – are people who don’t care what science has to say. They have their version of the truth. The movement was largely trivial and laughable in the 1970s and ’80s. But in the 1990s and early 2000s, it began to morph into something less innocuous and funny, and entered the mainstream. Today the “anti-vax” movement (which by definition is anti-science) has tens of millions of supporters in the United States alone.

Scientists in the modern age were not prepared for this change. They had never been trained to communicate science to people who don’t believe in them. They never thought that anyone would ever attack their ideas because science had such an authoritative voice in our society throughout most of the last century.

In 2005, I first started hearing episodes of serious anti-science efforts from some of my old evolutionary biologist friends who were attacked during speeches. People would suddenly stand up during their talks and ridicule them. 

 In 2006, I made a movie called Flock of Dodos: The Evolution-Intelligent Design Circus. I knew from the start that when evolutionists saw that title, they would think, “Oh wow, finally, here’s the movie that attacks these people who are attacking us and obliterates them.”

But my movie wasn’t anything of that sort. Instead, it was a critical examination of the swirling controversy around the teaching of evolution in the United States. I posed the question, “Which is the bigger flock of dodos?” Is it these people with their crazy intelligent design anti-science ideas, or is it the scientists who were having circles spun around them in public events and debates?  

The movie did very well, airing nationally for two years on Showtime. Much of why it did so well was because it had so much humor. It wasn’t just an analytical recitation of facts. It was broadly entertaining and most importantly, had solid narrative structure built around a problem (“Who is behind the intelligent design movement?”), which led to a journey in search of a solution (the answer of who was sponsoring the movement).  And this produced a simple realization, which was that the scientists had all the facts and yet couldn’t figure out how to get the public to listen to them. 

For mass communication, it mostly comes down to simplicity and iteration. You need to figure out something simple, and you need to do it over and over and over again. But unfortunately for science, there’s been an absence of these basic narrative principles and the proper mindset. All of this has gotten us to this point now, where there’s very little faith in the government [and leading scientists].  

How do you assess the emergency communication during the pandemic by the scientists, politicians, and public offices  in terms of storytelling? 

In 2016, the United States elected an anti-science president. When he got in office, the first thing he did was remove the United States from the Paris Climate Protocol, the Paris Accord.  That was a giant warning shot across the bow of the entire science community.  It said this president doesn’t care at all about your science.

So you now have this anti-science president, who has the biggest microphone in the country, spouting his anti-science thinking on different topics. The science community had no plan of action, no idea how to deal with this. 

Some people pointed out that the Obama administration had a whole program on preparation for a pandemic. Yes, but none of it involved figuring out a plan to deal with mass communication. That’s the weakness; the science world doesn’t understand mass communication. 

The United States is a media society, yet scientists do not understand the media. As a result, they can only really mobilize one-half of the needed solution. They can give you the research, but they just don’t know how to communicate it.

When Biden got elected, the first thing he did was put together his Advisory Council. It eventually consisted of 16 experts, but when you look at their credentials, they are PhDs, MDs, and public health scientists.  There was no one from the world of communication. 

As you might have predicted, the Advisory Council helped spearhead incredibly innovative work that produced the vaccines.  That part was great, but they didn’t address the other part of the equation, which is, once you’ve got the vaccines, how will you get people to take them.

In October 2020, one of the eventual members of Biden’s Advisory Council, Dr. Michael Osterholm, the Director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, was interviewed on NBC’s Meet the Press show. In that interview, he said that we’re doing a poor job of communication and are failing to speak in a single voice. What he meant was that we’ve got all these different people appearing on TV, and they’re contradicting each other, and the public just doesn’t know who to turn to for advice. 

He also said that we were failing to take advantage of the power of story and storytelling. The things he said made my ears perk up. So I got in touch with him.  We were on the phone talking within a couple of days.  I spent about four months working with him, helping him on his podcast, writing part of the script for his weekly podcast that he’s been doing ever since the beginning of the pandemic. 

Of all of these prominent scientists on TV, he’s the only one that I’ve seen who has spoken about the second part of the problem — meaning, what good are these vaccines if you can’t communicate effectively to the public on the need to take them? 

In your work, you have introduced the concept of the narrative spectrum and the AAA (And, And, And), ABT (And, But, Therefore), and DHY (Despite, However, Yet) templates. Can these concepts be used to explain the phenomenon of people disbelieving vaccine communication or being scared of the side effects?  

Yes.  For starters, research is needed on the destructive power of the DHY structure.  DHY is where multiple narrative threads are introduced so quickly that the listener gets confused.  It’s like saying that the vaccine has been produced, BUT the government made it, DESPITE not having enough time to test it, HOWEVER some labs created the virus, YET what about alternative medicines. 

The term DHY refers to multiple narrative threads, each created by a new contradiction using words like Despite, However, and Yet, three of the most common words of contradiction after But.  It’s too much narrative content which leads to obfuscation and ultimately confusion.

Let’s look at the climate change issue. It began to grow as an issue in the ’90s and early 2000s. The public still wasn’t very clued in on it. I just started to hear about it in 2002. One documentary was being worked on for HBO in 2003.

Then, in the summer of 2005, five hurricanes hit the United States. Many people in the environmental movement panicked and even said that summer that the climate has now changed; we’re going to have hurricanes every year. But then there were no major hurricanes for the next decade. Nevertheless, in a spirit of panic, they whipped together the movie that Al Gore ended up being in the center of, An Inconvenient Truth.

It was produced so quickly that it had poor narrative structure. It began with disaster, disaster, disaster.  When you look at the narrative structure, you see it lacked the basic progression of the three forces of narrative which are “agreement,” “contradiction,” and “consequence.” 

The first thing you want to communicate with is “agreement” before getting into all the problems. You want to come to the audience by saying, “What can we agree on here?”

What should have been said at the start of a movie like that, with an unmistakable and authoritative voice is this: Once upon a time, there was a giant atmospheric crisis that threatened the entire planet. But all the nations of the world came together and solved that problem. The problem was the ozone hole; the solution was the Montreal Protocol. It’s not still totally solved, but we’re on course. It was the biggest environmental agreement ever pulled together and it shows you how powerful climate science is. 

That would have started the process with everyone agreeing that climate scientists have brought us great many success stories in understanding the natural world.  Which means we should now trust them with this new situation of global warming. 

This is the basic psychology of communication. The brain is not programmed to process just problems being thrown at it from the beginning. 

The media’s coverage of COVID-19 was riddled with inaccuracy and biased reporting. In your book, you wrote that people want to be reminded where they stand and where they should go. There may be people wanting to tweak the story during a social emergency by adding or removing “But” and “Therefore” because of fear and anxiety, thus encouraging disinformation.  

The media is driven by eyeballs and financial gain, not societal responsibility. I know some people in the media world have a good conscience and do good things. But, in general, it’s an endless battle for the scientific community trying to get their message out effectively. 

The media world just wants you to tell the biggest and most sensational story that will get the most eyeballs. For instance, “Killer Bacteria Emerges in Local Park, Killing All the Kids” or whatever. They don’t care so much about exaggeration, which becomes a battle. All publicity is just warfare. It’s this all-out battle of controlling the narrative.  

And therein lies the problem.  The science world has so little understanding of this word “narrative.” Scientists just hand out their information, clueless about the importance of narrative structure. And that constitutes the core of the ABT (And, But, Therefore) framework that we’ve been developing for a decade.

What do scientists and public spokespersons need to do to communicate effectively? 

There’s a polar opposite mindset between the science world and the media world (or what we could call the narrative world). When you’re a scientist, you love large numbers. When you’re doing experiments, you want a large sample size, and the bigger the sample size, the more comfortable you feel. 

If there’s one thing you hate, it’s research with a small sample size. It just ruins your day when you’re at a big scientific meeting and somebody gives a talk, and it’s all interesting, exciting, and then you find out that n equals 2. They saw, they measured this twice, and they’ve told a big story around it. Scientists hate that at a profound and cultural level. 

As a scientist, I was always trained to be suspicious of singular accounts, which are labeled as anecdotes. For example, “I saw this one thing happen. I saw a rabbit jump over trees. Therefore, I think that’s a property that rabbits have.” Well, how many times did you see it? I saw it once. Then it’s just an anecdote. We’re not going to listen to that. Scientists hate anecdotes. 

But for powerful communication, the power rests in the specifics. Stories are at their most potent when they boil all the way down to the one character, the one thing, the one trait, the one moment.  Which means when it comes to communication, anecdotes are not only fine, they’re powerful.  And widely used.

Pick up any issue of, for example, The New Yorker, and there will be a feature article on some big topic, for instance, immigration in the United States. That article will begin with an anecdote. It will tell the story of one woman who had to swim across the Rio Grande River to sneak into the United States.  The one anecdote helps you connect with the human dimension.  It helps you understand the bigger picture. It’s the most powerful thing about communication.  And yet, it’s the same thing that is anathema to scientists. 

The depth of this divide is enormous. And yet we still need to bridge it.  And that’s what the ABT framework makes possible by realizing there is a single model for narrative structure that is found in every discipline, from science to economics to politics to law to entertainment and business.

The ABT is an incredibly powerful tool, but it has one big catch — you can’t learn it in a day.  You have to commit yourself to visiting “The Narrative Gym.” The idea of the book is that you need to work on the narrative the same way you go to a gym.  You have to commit yourself to doing it over and over again.  

You have been writing about scientists’ mentality of telling only the truth and being scared to express their personal stories and interpretations. We struggle every day with interacting and pushing scientists to talk about their work for the same reason. On the other hand, the public wants to hear about the specialist’s own truth of what to believe, think, and act. And often, from the science community, this gap is explained with the term “science literacy.” More and more, I feel this gap affects the social status of science. 

This is one of the fundamental problems the whole science profession doesn’t seem to understand; there are two main parts of science. First, there’s doing the research, and then there’s communicating it.

Unfortunately, these two elements are not the same. When doing research, you want to be accurate, be extremely careful, and get everything exactly right. So you take all the time you want and don’t ever want to make any mistakes. And you want to get it peer reviewed to ensure that everything to be published is absolutely right. 

You can’t afford that luxury when it comes to communication. There’s no perfect way to communicate. It’s so massively variable that all you can do is iterate, which over time develops intuition, and keep doing it repeatedly. When you communicate something, you have to just get it out there and do the best that you can.  If you wait too long, you lose.

This divide is not understood by scientists.  A couple of places I saw this vividly was when I was invited to the CDC and NASA by groups of their communications personnel. At both places, they talked to me about the tension that exists between scientists and the communications staff.  These scientific institutions have different cultures.  The scientists know what needs to be communicated; they just sometimes don’t know how.  The communicators know how to communicate; they just sometimes don’t know what it is that they’re communicating.  For it to work they have to come together.

After the last session of the day of my visit to NASA, they set me down in a room with about eight or so of their communications people. They sat in a half-circle. Each of them told stories – one after another – of all these bad experiences with scientists. The last one was a woman who started crying while telling her story. She said she interviewed a senior scientist. He had told her about 15 different projects he was doing. She picked the three most interesting ones and wrote about them. The day the article came out, he called her up and yelled at her, saying, “Where are all the other things I told you? I told you about this, this, and this. None of that is in your article.”  She explained that she couldn’t fit it all in there. But he wasn’t interested in listening. 

So, they are two completely different cultures. It is the humanities versus the sciences. With the ABT framework there is at least a tool to possibly help bridge the divide. We involve both ends with our narrative training through our ABT framework course. About two-thirds of our participants are scientists and about a third communicators.   

The nuance of the terms like “science communication” and “science communicator” is tricky, implying scientific information’s importance is self-evident. So, I can relate to the idea in your book that “science is not special compared to other information and stories.” In the age of mass and global consumption of stories, there is so much content on platforms like YouTube and Netflix, putting us in severe competition for people’s attention. But science communication is still often one-sided and inaccessible to people who generally don’t care about science. How can science communication use the tools used by the entertainment industry and Hollywood to break down this barrier? 

Scientists tend to be literal minded.  They typically want that anybody who is going to communicate for them knows their research topic top to bottom. I saw this when I was a scientist.  I wanted it too and was skeptical of communicators who didn’t understand my field of science.

One manifestation of this literal mindedness is when a scientific institution hires a new director.  The tendency is to search for someone who “knows the science,” which means they’ve done lots of highly regarded research.  Who doesn’t get sought out is someone who “knows people.”

What you get – and I saw this repeatedly – are these directors of large institutions that have no people skills. Which means they end up with endless personnel problems at their institute, in part because they don’t know how to talk with laypeople.  You end up with worse disasters than you would have if, instead, you had somebody with the managerial skills plus an advisor to help guide them on the science side. 

It’s a dilemma whether or not to demand so much from busy researchers. It is rare to find a researcher who is a great scientist but also an entertainer. One recent example is Professor Shinya Yamanaka, the Nobel laureate and iPS Cell Research Institute director. It was recently announced that he would retire as director and concentrate on his research. He had been making efforts to increase public awareness of his institute by appearing on TV and running marathon races, which took him away from actual research. To what extent should we expect scientists to be great storytellers? If not scientists, who should take the responsibility or fill the gap? 

Scientists do not need to be “storytellers.” They need to understand narrative structure. They need to grasp the three-part nature of communication — the basic setup, problem, and solution dynamic — and see how all that they do has the same basic structure.  Scientists set up a context, they identify a problem, and then work towards a solution — the same journey undertaken by a detective or an athlete.  Or a storyteller.  Narrative is universal.

Once you begin learning about narrative structure, you come to respect the overwhelming power of “the singular narrative.”  The audience wants to listen to a singular voice, not a cacophony.

This dynamic went out of control with the pandemic with all the scientists, doctors, and other experts appearing on TV shows when, in fact, many of them didn’t know what they were doing. They have the information, but no understanding of the medium through which it is communicated.  They don’t have the intuition that’s developed with years of media exposure and training. 

What is needed is partnerships between science and media experts.  A great example of how this can work is the Hollywood, Health & Society project (HH&S) at U.S.C.  The founder of the project 25 years ago, and still executive director, is my friend, Marty Kaplan. I’m a big fan of the program because, at the core, it lets the right people do the right things. It tries to get the right information (such as public health fact sheets from the CDC) to the right communicators (the writers of prime-time TV shows) and lets the professionals do the communicating with professional science advising.

This is my simple recommendation at that level — let the professionals do what they are trained to do.  For example, why doesn’t the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have a singular trained spokesperson who knows how to handle the complexity of messaging clearly, as the White House has with a single press secretary?

That’s the idea upon which the HH&S is built. Let’s not have scientists try and make their own movies. Instead, let’s have them work with the professional movie makers to help make sure that that gets done the right way. 

So, let’s let the Hollywood writers tell the stories. Let’s get the science experts’ cutting-edge information to the writers and have them work together. But let’s not try and have people that aren’t trained out there doing it.   And similarly, we don’t want filmmakers trying their hand at open heart surgery. 

Any concluding remarks? 

Michael Crichton was the only one I know who was truly proficient in the two “languages” of science and media. He was an actual scientist (a biomedical researcher who went as far as being a postdoctoral fellow at the Salk Institute) and an actual mass media maker (with movies, novels, and TV shows like Jurassic Park and E.R.).  He tried to teach us so much, but the science world listened to so little, as tends to happen.

He wasn’t driven to help with science communication per se, but he made himself available. He wrote essays, gave talks, and he talked with scientists about the increasing challenge of mass media. 

Before he left the biomedical science world, he published a short paper in the New England Journal of Medicine in December 1975, titled, “Medical Obfuscation: Structure and Function.” He took three articles from that publication, went through them, and compiled a list of the ten recurring characteristics that result in obfuscation, which means taking something relatively simple and communicating it in such a way that’s so convoluted you can’t make sense out of it.

He said it wasn’t always this way in the science world. A hundred years ago, scientists spoke, wrote, and communicated with clarity and conviction. They knew how to get to the essence of what they were saying. He goes on to say that only in the twentieth century has obfuscation become an accepted mode of communication.

That’s still the basic problem.  It’s where we are today. Obfuscation is worse than ever, yet there is little direct talk about it. 

In 1999, he gave his final, really constructive talk to the science world – the keynote address to the American Association of Advancement of Science. In that address, he stated bluntly that scientists don’t understand media.  

He then offered constructive advice that was basically a blueprint for how to deal with the anti-science movement emerging in the late 1990s.  He talked about “missed opportunities” and sadly became one himself eventually. 

Michael Crichton could have guided the science world in dealing with the media and the anti-science movement, but scientists mostly thought he was a sort of clown from Hollywood. And that’s so much of the problem — scientists tend to be so literal-minded; they can’t think broadly enough to see a golden resource right before them. 

One of the realizations I think I’ve come to in the last two or three years is that, as Crichton noted, we all thought and communicated better a hundred years ago. Somebody way up there in the upper echelons of science needs to start talking about this before the entirety of science ends up drowning in a sea of noise that was created by science.  

Further reading 

Authored by Randy Olson 

•      Houston, We Have a Narrative: Why Science Needs Story 

•      Don’t Be Such a Scientist: Talking Substance in an Age of Style 

•      Narrative Is Everything: The ABT Framework and Narrative Evolution 

•      The Narrative Gym 

•      Climate Communication’s Missed Opportunity and How to Fix It 

By other authors, recommended by Randy Olson 

•      The One Thing by Gary W. Keller and Jay Papasan 

•      They Say, I Say by Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein

Article edited by Mark Benjamin M.