How the story you tell about yourself affects your life. (TED-Blog)


We've all created our own personal histories, marked by highs and lows, that we share with the world - and we can shape them to live with more meaning and purpose.

We are all storytellers - all engaged, as the anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson puts it, in an "act of creation" of the "composition of our lives." Yet unlike most stories we've heard, our lives don't follow a predefined arc. Our identities and experiences are constantly shifting, and storytelling is how we make sense of it. By taking the disparate pieces of our lives and placing them together into a narrative, we create a unified whole that allows us to understand our lives as coherent - and coherence, psychologists say, is a key source of meaning.

Northwestern University psychologist Dan McAdams is an expert on a concept he calls "narrative identity." McAdams describes narrative identity as an internalized story you create about yourself - your own personal myth. Like myths, our narrative identity contains heroes and villains that help us or hold us back, major events that determine the plot, challenges overcome and suffering we have endured. When we want people to understand us, we share our story or parts of it with them; when we want to know who another person is, we ask them to share part of their story.




The opposite of a redemptive story is what McAdams calls a "contamination story," in which people interpret their lives as going from good to bad. One woman told him the story of the birth of her child, a high point, but she ended the story with the death of the baby's father, who was murdered three years later. The joy over the birth of her child was tainted by that tragedy. People who tell contamination stories, McAdams has found, are less "generative," or less driven to contribute to society and younger generations. They also tend to be more anxious and depressed, and to feel that their lives are less coherent compared to those who tell redemptive stories.





The researchers wanted to know which type of story would lead the research subjects to be more generous. To find out, they monitored the fundraisers' call records. Since the fundraisers were paid a fixed hourly rate to call alumni and solicit donations, the researchers reasoned, then the number of calls they made during their shift was a good indicator of prosocial, helping behavior.


Grant and Dutton's study suggests that the ability of a story to create meaning does not end with the crafting of the tale. The stories the benefactors told about themselves ultimately led to meaningful behaviors - giving their time in the service of a larger cause. Even though the fundraisers knew they were only telling their stories as part of a study, they ultimately "lived by" those stories, as McAdams would put it. By subtly reframing their narrative, they adopted a positive identity that led them to live more purposefully.