Same Issue, Different Frame: The Benefits of Keeping it Positive

Samantha McCann
The Whole Story
Published in
3 min readSep 27, 2017

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Mr. Kang and his colleagues set up the experiment this way: Children between the ages of 3 and 7 were invited to play a game in which they had to guess what a hidden toy looked like, based only on the sound it made. In the middle of the game, each child was told not to cheat by peeking at the toy, and then left alone in the room for one minute. Upon returning to the room, the investigator read aloud one of the three fables — Pinocchio’s nose, boy and wolf, chopped-down cherry tree — and then asked if the child had peeked at the toy.

The authors of the study expected that the children who had peeked and then heard either “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” or Pinocchio would confess their cheating, because in the former the lying character dies, and in the latter, suffers immediate public humiliation. The results, however, were contrary to what was expected:

Children who had peeked and then heard about Pinocchio or the boy who cried wolf were no more likely to confess their transgression than children who listened to a fable unrelated to honesty (“The Tortoise and the Hare,” as it happens). Only kids who had heard about George Washington owning up to chopping down the cherry tree were more likely to admit to the experimenter that they themselves had cheated.

Why the different responses depending upon the story?

The cherry-tree story emphasizes the positive consequences of honesty, Mr. Kang points out: Young George is lauded as admirable for telling the truth, no matter the consequences. The Pinocchio and boy-who-cried-wolf stories, on the other hand, focus on the bad things that befall those who lie.

If the insight here is that highlighting the positive can be more effective than warning about the negative, can it apply not just to children’s stories, but to adult stories as well–like the news? If so, what does it mean for journalists?

SJN co-founder David Bornstein often says that expecting journalism to help society correct by exposing its shortcomings every day is like expecting parents to help their children become better human beings by criticizing them every morning over breakfast. This study seems to agree: Highlighting the more positive elements, whether in fables or in daily news, may be more effective than persistent warnings that things are broken or that you have wronged. People tell stories like fables for many reasons, Paul writes–“to entertain, to pass the time, to share adventures from our own past. And sometimes we tell stories in order to make a point…the lessons of these stories are so clear, their meaning so unambiguous, that we rarely stop to wonder if they’re having the effect we intend.”

While the stories large media outlets report aren’t parables, they do indeed make a larger point to the audience. The unintended consequences of journalism that only exposes societal problems and not the responses to these problems is the construction of a gloomy, but false, reality–a narrative about a world beset with insoluble problems. Though these problem-based stories may be technically fact-based, they don’t capture the full reality of what’s happening because they omit widespread and successful efforts being made to address these social ills.

Journalism today is only telling half the world’s stories–the half mired in hopelessness and disfunction, corruption and scandal. Perhaps like the parable of George Washington cutting down the cherry tree, solutions journalism can be a more effective way of conveying the point, capturing reality, and resonating with readers, something that makes existing journalism more accurate and truthful, and facilitates more constructive and less divisive conversations.

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