Why We Cry at Sad Movies, and Why that Matters to Business
As a teenager, my sister and I watched the movie Beaches over and over again, with tears at each viewing. We knew the story was fiction, the people involved were actors, that it’s all pretend and no one actually dies. We had seen the movie so many times, it wasn’t even a surprise when it happened. And yet, curiously, every time we watched the movie, both of us couldn’t help but cry.
Have you ever wondered why we cry at sad movies? Or even just listening to a sad story told by a friend? Some of the neurological research over the past several years gives us some clues.
Our brains react differently to stories than other types of information. When we hear a dry list of facts, the areas of our brains that process language are activated. However, when we hear stories and metaphor, there are many more parts of our brains that are activated–specifically, those parts of our brains that would be activated if we were actually experiencing the story ourselves.
When I watch the scene from Beaches in which Victoria talks to CC after her mother’s death, it’s not only the parts of my brain that process language that are affected. The olfactory centers are activated, as if I was actually smelling the rain coming down outside. The touch centers that process the feeling of the soft bedspread and a tender hug are activated. The parts of my brain that process emotions like grief and sadness are activated, and I experience grief and sadness. Basically, on a neurological level, my brain can’t tell the difference between real life and a story.
Because more of our brain is activated when we hear stories than just facts, we have a more emotional reaction, and as a result stories tend to be more memorable and salient. An audience isn’t often swayed by hearing mountains of data, but instead can be moved by the remarkable anecdote. This phenomenon is captured morbidly in the famous quote often attributed to Joseph Stalin, “a single death is a tragedy; a million deaths, a statistic.” Clearly, stories are a critical part of our emotions.
Business is waking up to the fact that the ability to evoke an emotional experience has economic value, and that empathy and emotional intelligence are important job skills. Making people feel particular emotions is no longer a skill just for moviemakers, and more and more jobs require the jobholder to make someone else feel a certain way.
In the Experience Economy, authors Joe Pine and James Gilmore observe that the economy is evolving and shifting from a service-based economy to an experience-based economy. In an experience, additional economic value is created over and above goods or services alone. For example, parents purchasing a teddy bear for their child might pay up to $10 of $15 for the toy. However, the same parent will pay 2-3 times more to take their child to Build-A-Bear. In both scenarios, the child ends up with a teddy bear, but only at Build-A-Bear does the child get the personal experience of choosing the components and making the bear.
Pine and Gilmore argue that in the experience economy, work is theater and employees are actors. The most successful companies are doing many of the same things that moviemakers do in order to create a seamless and memorable “customer experience.”
It’s amazing how many jobs today have some element of emotional management. (As of February 2020, Indeed.com has 259,428 jobs available with the words “customer experience” in the job description.) In these jobs, it’s not just about what the employee is doing, but how they are doing it that matters. Often, it’s how well the employee handles emotional elements of the job that makes the difference between a mediocre worker and an outstanding worker. Consider the following:
The business leader who invokes feelings of purpose and pride in their staff is likely to get better results than the business leader who simply doles out work orders.
The home care worker that bathes and dresses their elderly client in a gentle way that preserves dignity does a better job than the home care worker that simply goes through the motions without respecting the client’s emotions, even though the end result is the same for both (client is bathed and dressed).
The students in the class with the teacher who shares rich, meaningful stories and case studies will likely learn more than from the class with the teacher who lectures with PowerPoint.
The ability to respect, take into consideration, and elicit others’ emotions is a critical part of many jobs, and these important abilities around empathy and emotions are so intertwined with storytelling. On the one hand, listening to other people’s stories makes us more tuned in to other people’s emotions. Further, creating an effective experience à la Pine and Gilmore requires narrative skills. After all, what is an experience but a story?