Think like a Scientist, Communicate like a Storyteller

What I've Been Thinking About Lately #97

Ray Rice, a former star running back for the Baltimore Ravens, was arrested in February 2014 after he punched his fiancée unconscious in an elevator.

The NFL conducted an investigation and, with all of the relevant information, decided that a 2-game suspension was appropriate. The suspension would cost him over $500k in missed games and fines.

For the months following, things were normal. Rice continued to practice with the team in preparation of the 3rd game of the season. However, in September 2014, the full video of Rice knocking her out surfaced. The Ravens immediately cut him, the NFL increased his suspension, and he would never play again.

There was nothing in the video that wasn’t in the investigation, but our experience of the facts changed. Watching her head jolt to the right and seeing her body smack against the handrail made the world respond differently than it had to the words.

Vision is our most visceral sense. We experience what we see more intensely than what we hear or read, that intensity changes what we believe. Videos of bombings on the news will incite people more than reading the newspaper description of it. Also, I can tell you about an injury to a pro athlete without issue, but you might turn away when the slow motion replay comes on.

This matters because if we only react strongly to things when we see them, we will miss important facts, even when they can save lives.

In 1847, Ignaz Semmelweis noticed that mothers were dying far more often when doctors delivered babies than when midwives did. He ordered doctors to wash their hands after autopsies and deaths during labor fell from 18% to 2%.

Armed with data, he took his finding to the hospitals, journals, and medical societies of Europe, excited to save lives of mothers everywhere. But doctors mostly rejected his idea. In the 18 years that Semmelweis yelled and screamed to wash your hands people never listened. They couldn’t see the germs that were killing mothers, so they didn’t believe they were real.

Semmelweis never lived to see his vindication, but in 1864, Louis Pasteur showed microscopic life caused disease. He left two flasks of broth open to the air, one shielded from microbes and one exposed. The exposed spoiled while the shielded stayed clear. This was evidence of germs that people could see. Soon after, Pasteur’s findings were applied to surgery and by the 1870s, handwashing was a standard medical practice.

So in both cases with Ray Rice’s domestic abuse punishment and Semmelweis’ call for handwashing, it was seeing that changed people’s perspectives.

We all know the idioms “Seeing is believing” and “A picture is worth a thousand words,” but I don’t think they are quite right.

“Seeing is believing” describes most, but not all. Semmelweis believed the numbers with no picture to go on.

“A picture is worth a thousand words” is wrong too. No number of words describing the Rice incident would have the impact that the video did. In this way, a picture/video is worth more than words can buy.

So what does this mean for our lives?

1. Our eyes can lie to us, so we should think like scientists
If you only believe what you can see, you’ll continually misjudge the world. You’ll overvalue anecdotes and viral videos while undervaluing statistics, trends, and invisible forces. You will miss the germ theory like the mother killing doctors.

2. Facts aren’t persuasive, so we should communicate like storytellers
Semmelweis died in an insane asylum because he was yelling at people instead of telling them a story. If he has done the work around finding the underlying reasons of the death and shown people germs, he would have been much more persuasive and successful.