The Science Behind Why Everybody Loves Stories Like "The Sixth Sense"
A new study shows that audiences love narrative reversals.
Think about your favorite book, movie, or theatrical production.
What about the story captivates you? What makes you recommend it to friends, family, co-workers, and fellow fans of the genre?
What makes for a good story is a question that pops into my head every time I take the stage as an improv comedian in my community.
My team and I have a question in our minds every scene: what the heck will make this audience laugh and cheer us on rather than excuse themselves and walk out early?
Our worst fear is that we end up boring the audience to death.
That’s why when you sketch out what makes an improv set work, it’s usually about establishing characters, giving them motivations, and then reaching what improvisers call the “first unusual thing” — the plot development that makes our scenes funny, goofy, and just plain interesting.
My sense is that people tend to like stories where the plot isn’t straightforward or monotonous.
That’s why M. Night Shyamalan made his name with the film The Sixth Sense. The plot twist in the final minutes of the movie threw audiences for a loop and put Shyamalan into the pantheon of film greats (even if most people would agree his latest offerings haven’t been of the same caliber).
A plot twist is one way to do what’s called a “narrative reversal” — a turning point in a story where we see major developments. These reversals are often what make a story pop; they’re the point when an OK plot turns into an amazing one.
At least, that’s my intuition. But maybe I’m wrong — maybe some people prefer plot consistency? Not everybody wants to feel like they’re on an emotional roller coaster while they’re thumbing through the latest novel or binging Netflix.
But a new study by Samsun Knight, a marketing professor at the University of Toronto, demonstrates that narrative reversals may indeed be the secret sauce to what makes a good story.
In his paper called “Narrative reversals and story success,” he worked with colleagues to scientifically analyze 30,000 television shows, movies, novels, and even GoFundMe fundraising pitches to see the impact of narrative reversals on how people feel about various plots.
They used a computational linguistic tool to track narrative reversals in stories; this allowed them to see, for instance, that there were sixteen narrative reversals in the 1999 film 10 Things I Hate About You.
Then, they looked at how the presence of reversals correlated to the success of the stories or fundraising pitches.
“For movies and TV rely on IMDB ratings,” Knight explained to me in an interview.
For books, they looked at how often they’re downloaded; fundraising pitches were rated based on how much they were able to hit their fundraising goals.
What they found is that people really like narrative reversals.
“Across all these contexts, we found that more and larger reversals are very strongly associated with greater success. So higher-rated movies, higher-rated TV shows….even within a given TV series, higher-rated episodes tend to have more reversals,” he noted.
So what’s the practical takeaway for writers?
“Cut your filler,” Knight advised.
He pointed to the anime series Bleach, which has a gargantuan 366 episodes.
“Some of those shows just fall into dozens and dozens of filler episodes,” he said, noting that he just couldn’t get into Bleach without wading through these moments.
Another takeaway is that reversals might be one way to make your plot resonate more with the audience.
“Even if you’re trying to write a sad story, that story might hit harder if you give the character happy moments,” he said.
So I’m interested in what everyone’s reading and watching these days. Are there any good stories you’d recommend to your fellow readers? Use the comments below to add your recommendations for fun stories, whether they have a lot of reversals or not.
As one who loves a good story, I'll have to chew on this as it relates to fiction. But an obvious example in the news cycle is the switcheroo the US Democratic party pulled off with the candidate for president. Given how the news media and garden-variety members of the professional-managerial class have reacted, this was a compelling narrative choice even if the character hasn't become three-dimensional yet.
Two other older movies, “Jacob’s Ladder” and “The Usual Suspects”, stick in my mind as having interesting plot twists. I can’t recall many newer movies with creative twists. PC writing has caused most everything to devolve into juvenile potty humor. Hollywood thinks we are all 9-years old in the 4th grade and have only a vulgar vocabulary for emotional expression.