Sara Grady studies the function of entertainment—why we watch, play, and listen to the media that fill our lives. She’s an assistant professor of Communication at Ohio State University. In our conversation, we explore what entertainment actually does for us, what it means to connect with fictional characters, and how storytelling shapes our relationships and well-being. Sara also shares her path from film production to media psychology and why understanding stories only deepens their magic.
Transcript
Please note that the transcript is for the interview portion of the episode only, and it was automatically generated with AI assistance. It has not been checked for accuracy.
Andy Luttrell: So here, here’s my big broad, uh, opening question, which is, what is entertainment for? I, you know, I wrote this down and I was like, this is a great opening question. And then I realized like I’ve been asked like those kind of big picture questions before and I get really stressed out by them. ’cause I’m just like, we work in such a small, narrow.
Infrastructure usually in terms of like the questions that we’re testing in. And someone will come along and ask me just like, so how do we persuade people? And I go like, whoa, okay.
Sara Grady: How much time do you have? Yeah, that’s like, I’m not
Andy Luttrell: even ready to answer a question like that, but I don’t care. I’m doing it to you.
Let’s do it. So what is entertainment for?
Sara Grady: So entertainment first we should define our terms, right? Yeah. So entertainment is broadly the media that we turn to for. Certain types of affective and emotional outcomes by and large. So for most people, we’re thinking tv, movies, video games, YouTube channels, um, music books, comics, media that you’re not primarily looking at as a source of information, right?
So it’s kind of the other side of the coin. So in really traditional, like a hundred years ago research, there was the media and the sources that you go to to learn things. And there’s the sources you go to, to be entertained. And obviously that’s actually a really gray spectrum, right? There’s a lot of content that sits in the middle of those.
Um, but that’s where the traditional disciplinary lines were. And so now when we think about entertainment, that means we’re asking what do people feel and what do they get and what do they want from their entertainment use, which means we can use the same theories and logics even when new technologies come to play.
So I can ask about VR in the same way I would’ve asked about silent movies a hundred years ago, because we’re asking what does it do for the user? What are they getting out of it? So like that’s the really big answer. But within that, I think there’s kinda an umbrella of the specific needs and services and functions that entertainment can serve.
And different schools of thought organize ’em in different ways, but by and large, since early cinema, we can see there are people who go specifically to be in a good mood. You wanna laugh, you want something funny. Um, there’s also a category of needs that are around. Giving you something to think about or distract you or sort of a new way of engaging with the world.
So if you think about watching Planet Earth, for example, it is entertainment in that you are being exposed to something you wouldn’t be otherwise. And it’s edifying, but not necessarily the news. But there are also, and a lot of my work focuses on the social functions of entertainment. It is something that even when we do them alone, we do them together.
You want to talk about the finale of great TV show Back at Work. You want to share a book you loved with your friends and family. And so entertainment also has this social glue function of worlds and ideas and emotions that we all care about, enough that we use them in our social interactions every day.
Hmm.
Andy Luttrell: So as this is maybe a point at which like psychology and comm have their little spats, which is just like, I’m curious if the functions that are served by entertainment have changed over time. And I think there’s like a very common answer, which is just like, well, every kind of, every medium is different.
And like it’s all about like the particular messages and sort of the social environment in which it’s in. And the basic social psychologist to me is like, it can’t possibly matter, right? Like there are these fundamental needs and like why, why would those change with changing landscapes and obviously the answer somewhere between, but like, I’m curious, you know, you compared, I forget, silent movies to something else that’s more contemporary.
Like, are those fundamentally different things? Are they. Even if fundamentally different, are they different in any way or would you go like, I don’t care, they’re equivalent as far as like the theory goes.
Sara Grady: So I think for me, the way that you separate them out is both how they are perceived and experienced.
So that is psychological, but also physiological. So I think one of the examples I gave was virtual reality, right? When you’re using these augmented haptic suits, you are physically feeling things different. Than you are in a movie screen. And so when we talk about how people interact with their media environment, new technologies keep changing the physicality of it.
So the button controllers of an old video game system are different than an arcade system are different than when you’re playing a board game. And that physical structural space is always moving. And I think that’s actually more of an ergonomic engineering type question than a traditional psych type question to some degrees.
Um, and that’s why com sits in the middle of a lot of areas. For me, I think the cool space is that those basic, fundamental needs of what we get from our media, why we seek it out, what functions it serves in our own lives, and relationships are pretty basic because humans are pretty straightforward. Our, our basic systems and online processing aren’t that different than they were thousands, if not millions of years ago.
So there were some of these things that are always the same. But how our social and cultural and environmental processes play a role in this stuff keeps moving too. So I think that’s why asking questions about social media, for example, is really interesting as a unique manifestation of this. Because not only are you watching a video and the same processes of how light and sound and watching characters and their thoughts and feelings all work, like other audio visual, but you get all the feedback of the likes and the comments, and if you decide to share it with your friends, you can physically send it to them in a way that you couldn’t with movies or TV in the past.
Changes the social dynamics of how we make sense of and how we continue to revisit and reuse these media today. Hmm.
Andy Luttrell: Well, one of the possible changes that I was thinking of, and maybe as I keep thinking of it, it’s like, well, maybe that doesn’t really do it, which is, uh, the opportunity to connect with the person being portrayed, right?
So there’s some sense in which like a lot of modern media is built around like, oh, I feel like I’m friends with this person. I don’t know, which may not have been so much the case. Ages ago, but like also maybe not, like why, why wouldn’t it, like why wouldn’t people have these kinds of like parasocial relationships in, in other forms that media would take?
So I dunno that that one struck me as like, oh, one of the social functions could be something like that that has changed over time, but like also maybe not,
Sara Grady: but yes. Yeah, I think the answer is sort of yes and no because you see, it’s, I think all of us know somebody, even if we don’t admit it about ourselves.
Somebody who has like a massive crush on a celebrity, right? Or the people you follow online and they inadvertently you start buying the clothes that they’re promoting on their Get Ready With Me videos. Um, and so we all know how these social processes kind of look and manifest and they’re actually not that different from when you look at celebrity culture from silent films.
There were still magazines and posters and fans going to red carpets to get autographs. Like it’s a very similar process that I feel attached to this person. I want them in my life. I care about what they think, I care about what they wear, I care about what they eat. Um, but I think the thing that is different now.
When we think about those changing media structures and systems and, and affordances, is that there’s more of a two-way street than there’s ever been. Um, so my, my father-in-law actually is a big movie, Buffy. He worked in the film industry for a long time, and so his whole office is covered with old black and white photos of like movie stars that he would write them a letter and think they would send him back a signed photo.
Mm-hmm. Which is a very classic version. Right. I, I think you’re really interesting. And so I said, you know, and you know I exist. You sent me something back. And is that really that different than getting a, like on Instagram, structurally? Functionally, I think that the social reward we feel for being seen and recognized probably isn’t all that different, but the immediacy by which it happens and the visibility by which other people see it, right?
It, if Selita Gomez retweets me, it’s not just that she saw my tweet, it’s that everybody else sees that she saw my tweet and she sort of amplified my message in some way. And that kind of recursively does feel like it’s speeding up and getting larger in modern media in a way that it couldn’t before.
Andy Luttrell: So this has a lot to do I think with like the consequences of media.
And I’m curious about the part, like why am I choosing to watch this versus that? Are there, are there certain ways that people navigate that kind of choice that is revealing of like what these kinds of media are doing for them?
Sara Grady: Yes. So a lot of the work I’ve been doing right now is actually trying to parse this from, from a psychological like methods perspective, we’re gonna get in the weeds.
Here is the difference between, between subjects differences and within subjects differences. So a lot of the research about what media people choose comes down to a tradition of experimental between subjects, designs, you upset some people and you don’t upset other people, and you see which TV channel they wanna turn on.
Or a classic study was asking people to remember a big breakup they were on or weren’t, and then make a playlist of songs kind of a thing, right? Mm-hmm. And so you can see how people who are in different mood states turn to different kinds of entertainment as a way to sort of self-manage, self-regulate, um, deal with what’s going on in their lives.
But one of the things that this, like brand new work that I’m trying to do is asking, that’s great, but we know there are so many fundamental differences in what you like and what I like that. If we don’t parse a single person and watch them track, okay, I’m in this kind of mood. I choose this kind of thing, I’m in this mood, I choose this kind of thing.
I think we’re missing a lot of the nuance there. And we’re maybe seeing some between subjects differences that we’re attributing to mood, but might actually be person based differences. Um, so I think it’d be really cool to look at some of that stuff as sort of a watch this space question for right now.
Andy Luttrell: Mm-hmm. So, so the difference would be that like, instead of. Me frustrating one group of people and not another, and then just seeing what they end up doing differently from each other. I would just frustrate you. Yeah. And and see if that makes you change course. Yeah. To something that you weren’t doing before.
Sara Grady: Yeah. And even doing some more longitudinal kinds of designs where I have a group of people right now, we’re collecting some data to watch them every day where many days and say, Hey, how are you feeling? What was your day like? What’s going on for you? What did you choose to watch tonight? And we can kind of track hopefully.
And while that will only be correlational, I think that’ll help set up the groundwork for future experiments where we can look and see over a couple of different instances of, I really stressed you out, or I gave you a bunch of compliments and really boosted your self-esteem. Or, I, you were worried and anxious about world issues.
You have no control over what kind of media you use to regain a sense of autonomy and control in your life. Um, and I think that will be really exciting.
Andy Luttrell: Mm-hmm. Uh, it is in the weeds, but I’m glad you went there because. Part of what I was wondering too, and I think people are wondering is like there’s a certain level of like armchair cultural studies philosophy that can go on where you’re just like, well of course, uh, these movies serve this purpose.
Um, but like, how do we actually know that this is like people are being driven by their needs, like kind of core needs and it’s showing up in their experience of like media choice or whether this piece of media satisfying. Um, and so you’ve given a little bit of a taste or is there anything that we might be missing in terms of like funda, like commonly how are we studying?
Whether entertainment media is serving kind of basic needs or not. Mm-hmm.
Sara Grady: So the work from my PhD advisor is kinda the, you know, a lot of people go to grad school because there’s some researchers who doing really cool work. And so my advisor and their team was specifically looking at the basic needs from self-determination theory.
So this idea that all humans have this basic need to feel related and connected to other people, a basic need to feel competent and capable and successful in their lives, and a basic need to feel. Autonomous, they have a sense of freedom. They get to make decisions about their own life. And these kind of trifecta of needs underlie a bunch of our decision making inside and outside of mediated context.
And so they did some of the first studies in Comm that looked at how though you could manipulate those three needs in mostly video games and see how that changed which games people wanted to play or which game settings they were interested in. Um, so for example, they would have people who were playing an actual flight simulator video game, and people who were just watching it.
And seeing how being able to physically do it yourself changed how much you felt or, or what you thought about the game, or how your own needs were, were affected on the other side. And so I think these three needs make a really nice library when we think about media, because all stories are about relationships, right?
If you have multiple characters, they all have to interact and have thoughts and feelings about each other. And so the, the relationships and connections among those people kind of fundamental to. The kinds of fiction that I’m really interested in studying. But when we think about like games, that competence and autonomy, that physical gameplay, that manipulation of your environment kind of processes.
We see some cool experimental research that shows not only do people choose games when their competence needs have been threatened, that have a different difficulty level, but that when you play a more or less difficult game, it helps you feel more or less confident in your life.
Andy Luttrell: Hmm. So just to like tell the story of it, right?
Yeah. Like if I suddenly start to question my competence and now I’m firing up a video game. Yeah, what, what’s the direction of it? So what, how? How am I likely to interact now with the game? So
Sara Grady: theory would say,
Andy Luttrell: Uhhuh,
Sara Grady: that let’s say you had a horrible day and everything went badly. You like failed some test or something went horribly wrong, and you feel like you don’t have the competence, success, success in your life that you want.
Theoretically, you should then look for games that will help you feel more confident, capable. So you’re likely to play a game that you’re already pretty good at, over a new one. You’re likely to play a game at a medium difficulty level where you can feel like you’re challenged, but it’s not so hard.
You’re gonna be bad at it. It makes you feel worse. You’re going to play a game that. Makes logical sense to you, right? Like there’s some sort of cognitive processing load sort of fluency stuff going on in there and how much you wanna take on a lot of new information, um, when things are going badly. But conversely, let’s say you’re having a terrible day because you got a huge fight with somebody that you really.
You are really close to and you feel very distant from them. Or we actually have some studies where we look to grief and loss and how they relate to media use, right? You have this sort of hole in your social life. You might turn to media that it can specifically help with that in a couple of different ways.
So perhaps you wanna watch a show you’re really familiar with because you already feel connected to all those characters. You can kind of restore your sense of feeling, okay? You do have people you care about. The world is a kind of safe, okay? Place right there. There are relationships that are important to you.
But we’ve also seen in some of the qualitative data things like people watch shows that remind them of their loved ones. Especially when I was doing research on media. You, during COVID, you could see people who were watching movies that reminded them of their siblings because they were social distancing separately.
They couldn’t be together personally. So it made me think of you, it made me feel closer to you to watch this movie that we both loved as kids. Um, and so there you’re actually sort of. Reinforcing a distal relationship through a mediated process. That kinda doesn’t matter what the story was, it matters how you built your memories around that narrative.
Andy Luttrell: It, it’s a good case. I can imagine that there are people who are like, oh, you study movies and TV shows. Like, okay, have fun. But like, this is like, that is like as deep as it gets, right? Like this is something that like is available to you. Like isn’t it a miracle that it’s, there’s something out there that’s available to us that is like.
Kind of, it’s innocuous in its availability, but it’s actually really potent in the things that it can do for you.
Sara Grady: Yeah. And I think one of the things I love about it, I mean as much as I do love TV movies and that’s kinda how I got into all of this racket, um, it’s also true that I think there’s a growing number of us that say, yeah, there are some really cool theoretical reasons we can explain and understand why people choose the media they do, or how different situations should predict different kinds of media use.
But more and more I think. The better we paint that picture, the more detailed we understand those processes, the more we could seriously consider things like interventions or prescriptions, or think about if we know media can reliably be helpful in some conditions and harmful in others, can we help people make those choices?
Because it is relatively cheap. It is abundantly available. We have so much media at our fingertips. If we all were more versed in what’s going to help and what’s not, we might really be able to navigate that environment, I think with a lot more control over our own experiences than some people feel like they have in our algorithmically driven universe.
Andy Luttrell: Mm I It brings up another question I had, which is like, how. In tune are people with this, like, to what extent is this something that people are knowingly, they know what makes them feel good, they know what they need, and they say, well, I am rationally processing my current state and uh, therefore I need to watch this show tonight.
As opposed to something more like the analogy I was thinking it was like an iron deficiency, right? Like, your body is lacking something and I have a craving for iron rich foods, but I don’t, it doesn’t occur to me that that’s why I just go like, oh, that sounds good. Like, does it seem more like that or does it seem more like people are actually engaged in a calculus of making themselves feel the things they need to be feeling?
Sara Grady: I mean, it’s hard, right? Because when you ask people about how they feel about stuff, that changes their answer. Mm-hmm. So there’s only so much that we can really get under the hood of that, uh, with some of the methods and tools. I think one of the cool things that I’ve been seeing in a couple of our studies about media use for recovery, like you had a stressful day when you watch to feel better, um, we see some pretty significant differences by age group that.
Older people are better at choosing what’s gonna help them feel better. So there is some indication that it’s kind of a learned process that you figure out what works for you over time and whether you can articulate it for me or not, you instinctively start being better at this kind of process. Um, but there’s this whole other arm of work that I’ve been working on that will hopefully help hint at some of this stuff where we’re trying to actually look at what’s going on, um, in people’s brain activity, sort of in their online processing while they watch movies.
And eventually, maybe also while they’re making choices about media use to sort of see what’s happening under the hood in a way that self-report can’t always help us get to, because it’s hard for us to know. What our reasons are for something, and we sometimes come up with a reason retroactively that may or may not have been the case in the moment.
Andy Luttrell: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. We’ll, we’ll get to the, the narrow stuff in a little bit, but first I need you to settle a, a family dispute, which is not so much a dispute, but as I was reading about, what, what is the, what is the fancy name for the model that, that,
Sara Grady: oh, I, I almost cringed to say it because I always said I would be one of those people who never makes a box and arrow model that has a giant acronym for a name, and then I went, did it
Andy Luttrell: boxes and aero.
So
Sara Grady: many, so many. But there, there is a model that we publish that is the social influences and media use model, which, so the acronym would be SIMU or siu, as some people say. I wonder if
Andy Luttrell: it was pronounceable.
Sara Grady: Uh, kind of uhhuh. Um, but I think the core of it is that it’s about the social systems and influences, right?
What’s going on in our social lives and in our social world, and what’s going on in our media use and how do those two interact with each other, is kinda what the bread and butter of this model is supposed to be about.
Andy Luttrell: So, a as I’m reading about this model, I’m thinking about my dad who now listens to this podcast.
So, hello dad, if you, hi dad. Who, so like there’s been a, a constant tension between us forever, which is that I am not someone who has ever really found much interest in sports. Uh, and my dad desperately wishes that I had been someone who has found an interest in sports. Um, and, and so like it comes up all the time of like, why, why, why do you like it and why don’t you like it?
Uh, and the, this notion of like the needs and the, what the media does for us was kind of coming up. So like one version of the story is like, um, my dad and I have different needs, right? Sports address is a particular kind of social need. I don’t really feel lacking in that for whatever reason, whereas.
This is more important to him, and so like it just serves that need more for him than me. The other is that like we are both people and we have the same basic needs, but for whatever reason, sports doesn’t. Address those needs for me, but they do for him. And so what I’m curious about is like, do, do those seem actually like two plausibly and distinct hypo like processes And also really what this is, is a vehicle to talk about the like flexibility of media affordances, if I’m gonna get into the technical words, but, but like.
Does media always do the same thing for everybody, right? Or is it possible that what it’s doing for me, it’s just not gonna do for another person? Yeah.
Sara Grady: Um, well, I think while both of those logics, I think have some legs to them, I think there is a lot of evidence to say that the same media doesn’t work the same for everybody.
Right? And so your, your sports example is a good one. Another one is horror movies. I can’t stand horror movies. Some people really love them, right? So clearly we’re not getting the same thing here. Um, and that is, I think if we zoom out to, you know, the 5,000 foot level, when you think about a piece of media, like an entire football game.
Or an entire movie. You’re talking about thousands if not millions of variables, right? You’ve got every single character and every single different shot and all the different plot lines and what kinds of words and language were used. If you’re thinking about it in a mechanistic way, there are so many things going on, which is why a lot of this research, we need to use a lot of different stimuli to kind of, um, wash that out.
But that means there’s also certain things that might be working. In sports for him that aren’t working for you because of what things you’re paying attention to in it. Um, there’s a really cool body of research from back in the seventies that was showing, um, so this burging literature, the bask and reflective glory work, which has probably come up, uh, in other spaces, but you see that people after they watch their favorite team win, they feel more competent and capable, right?
So there’s a really cool study where they had college students on two campuses watch the same game. And so some of ’em immediately won and some of ’em immediately lost. And then they had them rate themselves like, how good are you to game of darts? Or of all these people who would say yes to going on a date with you and people who.
Their team just won, read themselves higher on literally everything. I’m smarter, I’m funnier, I’m more attractive. But they don’t say they’re luckier. So this isn’t some magic. Oh, I just have a positive mood boost and I’m assigning that to all of my characteristics. It was specifically things you had control over, you were just better at than if you’re team won.
And so I’ve always wondered with sports, particularly if there’s this kind of competence strain underneath it, of being able to be part of something powerful on top of all the social motives of, I’m part of this team and I’ve been following these players for years. And like my dad’s a big Notre Dame fan, and so he can tell you all the players and all the coaches and all the things, and he’s part of a social world.
On top of all the sports world. And for me, neither of those are really, really scratchy, the same edge, frankly. I’m, I’m, I’m on the same team as you. I,
Andy Luttrell: is this, um, like, uh, the same, does it explain differences in preferences? Right? So like, one way in which people differ in the media, like juice is just like, I just like, I, like I have taste, right?
I’ve taste and this, and your taste is different. And is that explained completely by this, like, needs and what media does for us? Or is it, does it seem like this is an independent part of the story? Right. It doesn’t matter, like whether it’s the kind of thing you like or dislike. There’s this extra independent component, which is like, what?
Scratch, what itch is it scratching?
Sara Grady: Yeah. I think they, they sort of dovetail but are distinct in that I think especially, um, judgments of taste and what is good is often based on like aesthetic stuff, right? Mm-hmm. Like you have indie movies that have a very different style to the way they tell the story, the way the dialogue is structured.
And so there are some taste mechanics that are really about class, about education, about how much money you have. Um, but I think needs are an important, if not the only piece, right? That, um. I think there are other individual differences that can also play a role here in how these preferences develop.
And so while for sports, I could see that very much being a sort of competence thing. The horror movie example feels very different in that I think, um, there are ways that I struggle with anxiety that may or may not be related to the fact that horror movies are just awful. Just they are physically uncomfortable.
And I know lots of people that that’s not the case. It doesn’t worry them, it doesn’t upset them. They don’t ruminate on it. And I don’t know of any literature that looks at specific DSM. Diagnoses and how that relates to horror movie watching, though note to self for later. Um, but I think there are also differences like that in just how we process incoming information that’s gonna impact how we then appraise and assess media
Andy Luttrell: very large.
Mm-hmm. So why do you do all this? What, what’s your deal? I, I, I was really intrigued. I think last semester I was sharing some, some research that I was doing, and you made a comment once that was like, um, oh, I just know that, like, having worked in the industry that like people care about this, that, and I went, Hmm, what, what’s the story here?
So. Uh, I think there’s an interesting story too, where like you are talking, uh, in a very informed way about like the academic approach to media, but that has not always been the path that you’ve been on, I don’t think.
Sara Grady: No, it has been a long and winding journey. Um, so yeah, the, the study you’re talking about, you were designing some stimuli and it had characters and they had like different lighting on them.
Mm-hmm. And so I immediately was thinking about how a shot is lit, changes the way that the audience will potentially feel about it, or at least how they’ll interpret the character. Um, because once upon a blue moon when I was an undergrad, I really thought I was gonna go into film production. Hmm. I started out with.
A major in engineering and a minor in film studies essentially. And I came from a long line of engineers and I, I think, and problem solve like an engineer, but I actually had no interest in any of the careers that seems to be available in that space. And so I minored in film and did a bunch of production work in undergrad.
So I was producing film, short movies, that kind of thing. I sort of liked this building and creating and problem solving around a creative output. You know, we all get together and we make something with it. And so that original training showed me a lot about how media is composed. So I was taking classes in virtual reality and cinematography and kind of how.
You build media and that was great and that was interesting. And then I did a couple of internships and I did not like it at all. Um, there were things about the lifestyle of being in Hollywood and being on the clock all the time and having so little control and like, there was just a bunch of stuff about it that lifestyle wise, I was like, this is not for me.
I thought we were all just gonna like. It’s
Andy Luttrell: making stuff,
Sara Grady: making cool stuff all the time.
Andy Luttrell: These are, these are like Hollywood internships, like in,
Sara Grady: so I was in Chicago Okay. With a company. And then I was, I went to Yvan, I was in Ann Arbor for another one, and they had both done work in LA and like won local Emmy’s and stuff.
And so they were, they were doing the bread and butter, the work, and I was like, yeah, I get it. But we did the equivalent of like filming, um, a Thanksgiving day parade and I had to be up at like 4:00 AM to stand in the rain with a cameraman holding microphone. I was like, this is awful. Um, and so I realized like, maybe this isn’t for me.
The part I, the part I really like is about the audiences and so, um, I took a class in undergrad that was specifically about fan communities and cultures. And it was fascinating. It’s still, I think, probably one of the most pivotal moments of, of my sort of academic journey. And so then when I went to do my master’s, I was in a critical and cultural studies program, so very qualitative and in its approach, very text oriented.
And I was studying fan communities. I was really interested in not so much how you make a movie, but why does anybody care about it? What do they do with it? Why does it make us feel the way it feels? Um, and so my master’s thesis was actually on Buffy the Vampire Re. I definitely
Andy Luttrell: noticed this on your cv.
I um, you brought it up before I could get there. I did
Sara Grady: because there, there are certain audiences for whom that is like a big flag, right. And I was really interested in not just the show, but how people connected to it and talked about it, sort of these online spaces where people were so invested in it even after it had been off the air for years.
Um, and it was great and there was a lot that I loved about that. But being in a. A purely critical cultural program. I could feel that I had all these questions that I wasn’t quite answering and I didn’t have the language for it at the time. And so I left after my master’s and I started working in, I was living in Europe at the time, and so I started working and thinking about how can I use this?
Like what if this is a useful skill? Right? And I landed in a variety of jobs that were specifically about audience engagement. Um, so I was working at a book festival. I worked for a couple of museums. I did some consulting work for like the BBC, where they were really interested in what content do people get super invested in, why do they get really invested in it, and how can we get them to come to stuff.
So I was doing a lot of like audience development, um, events, marketing kind of work that was saying, we know there’s this huge hungry audience. How do we make the most of it? And so it ends up being more like Strat Comy, pr sort of job world. But it kept me asking what. What are people getting outta this?
How do I, how do I capitalize on that? How do we articulate what that is and the value of that really emotional connection? ’cause even if it’s not Buffy, whatever that show was that you loved as a middle schooler or whatever game you could not wait to get home from school to play had a really profound impact.
And that’s sort of the, the nut of what I wanted to look at. And so I was working for years. Um, I kept turning back to this idea of stories that it’s, it’s not just. Media, but it’s, it’s the characters and it’s the events and it’s the emotion of, you know, there are certain stories you bring up and people know like, yeah, when you read where the Whiteford grows, you remember that dog, right?
Um, and you have this intense. Emotional process that really lasts over time. And so I eventually came back to grad school for my PhD to ask some of those questions quantitatively. I sort of discovered that media psych existed. Mm. And it blew my mind. I was like, wait, I can do all that math engineering stuff, but ask questions about how stories work and why people love what they love and how we make relationships and choices around this stuff like that.
Sounds amazing. So. Well into my thirties, I was like, great, let’s go back to school. And I did and it was wonderful. And so I ended up in a com program where we specifically studied entertainment and me almost exclusively narratives to ask some questions about who is the audience, what are they thinking, how are they feeling?
How does this stuff work? And that’s really what I do now.
Andy Luttrell: Hmm. Do, do you find that this trajectory makes you ask and answer questions differently than like peers or other people in, in your discipline? Like is there anything you can put a finger on of like, I have a feeling that like I came to that question because I have a different kinda outlook on this thing having been like steeped in it.
Sara Grady: I think, I think yes in a couple of ways. And one of them is having had a real critical cultural training of thinking about. What is the text, right? Like what is actually going on in this piece of stimuli and what is it putting out and who made it and why did they make it? And what sort of social cultural system made this movie come into being is a lot of the kind of questions that you get in a Birmingham school training.
Um, but more than that, I think there was such an emphasis on what do people interpret that there is this missing link between, you put a piece of media out in the world and then when everyone watches it or reads it or hears it, they will all bring themselves and their own internal universe to that process.
And that means they’re all gonna take slightly different things from it. They’re all gonna understand it in slightly different ways. And I think that frame is what makes me ask these questions about how and why people do things because I am interested in. The big between subjects differences. What if this is similar for all of us, but that’s only possible to unpack if we understand also what is different for all of us about this and how those two fit together, I feel are in some ways taking a legacy of critical cultural questions about media and just bringing them into the fold and some of the quantitative conversations we’re having in the field now.
Andy Luttrell: Hmm. Having, having had that spark of just like, you know, entertainment and like filmmaking, do you ever worry about killing the frog? Do, do you know, do you know the, do you know the one I’m referring to? There’s, there’s a, I think it’s ED White has this quote about, um, thinking about humor and. It’s something like, um, analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog and the frog dies in the process.
Right? That like Right. You become so focused and precise that the magic that was there, it is just gone. Right. And so like, I, it’s always this careful dance. Things like media and entertainment and art. I always get a little wordy when we bring like quantitative social science into it because I go like, there is.
Uh, maybe I just want to think there’s like still some like mystical, magical part of it. Yeah. Uh, that I worry about being a little jaded about. No, I see what you mean.
Sara Grady: And certainly, especially my colleagues and friends that study this, we sometimes joke, you can’t turn off, right? Mm-hmm. I watch TV and this stuff is constantly going through my head while I watch it.
That’s sort of an intrinsic part of how I interpret it and make sense of media now. But I think the counterpoint. And I came up against this a lot. I used to do a lot of training for scientists about how to tell stories about the research and use cognitive science research on stories and narratives. As part of that process was, uh, a quote from Richard Feynman who says, some people will enjoy the beauty of a flower for what it is.
But when I understand how it evolved to be shaped like this, when I can understand how its colors look different to a bee and how that makes it propagate in different ways, when I can see the fractals of how the petals develop in this really precise mathematical formula, it makes it more beautiful, not less.
And I think, I mean, I butcher that that’s not actually the quote, but you get the gist of it, right. You get, you see what I mean? And I think for me it’s a similar thing that. Storytelling has been around since the beginning of human society, right? We were painting on walls, we were talking around a campfire.
The idea of how stories and entertainment work. We wouldn’t have been doing it this whole time if it wasn’t doing something valuable. But the fact that we’ve been doing it for this long, we still don’t get it or know why or know how, or know how to pull those levers reliably means I think we’re missing some of the, the beauty of, of what this is.
We’re doing it, I would love to understand it, to even appreciate it more rather than less.
Andy Luttrell: Hmm. Yeah, that is great. And I, I wanted to ask about the science communication training that you did. So this is sort of top of mind ’cause I’m thinking about it. I do a series of interviews with science communicators, um.
And I’m very interested in like, what are the kinda like tricks of the trade? Like what are some things that people can do to enhance the impact of talking about science? And so this is just my opportunity to just like, ask the question, like what, what, uh, as like a storytelling scholar mm-hmm. What, what, what advice can you give to someone who wants to like, make what they’re doing land in a bigger way?
Sara Grady: So I think. There are a couple things. I actually used to co-teach a graduate class about this, so there’s a lot we could dive into, but I think one of the easiest things to take away is that storytelling as a rhetorical structure is different than other kinds of information conveyance vehicles, right? A story is different than a graph.
It’s different than a report. And one of the fundamental ways it’s different is that it’s focused on characters and causal events. A story is a story because you have a person and they do things, and then there are outcomes that come from that action. That is, that is what all stories are, right? At their, at their core, and I think using that framework.
To explain what science is or how it works or how and why you as a scientist are asking the questions you are asking Can humanize what science is and bring it down to a human scale. Um, so I worked a lot with like astrophysicists and they would really struggle to explain like, what is going on? I’m like, but why do you do it?
Mm-hmm. What’s it for? What are you hoping to get from this? And that would often help ground them in the why of the work in a way that that didn’t always feel obvious when you’re in the weeds.
Andy Luttrell: Great.
Sara Grady: It’s like I can keep going, but how long understand do you have?
Andy Luttrell: But as a wrap up, I do wanna get back to the brain stuff.
Oh yeah. So all, all things end and begin, uh, in our gans. And so I wonder how a neuroscience perspective might inform storytelling or might inform our understanding of it. And as I was looking at this work that, that you’ve done, it was reminding me that in grad school, I, I’ve also always been interested in storytelling.
And I bought a book once that was like a neuroscience guide to storytelling. And I was like, oh, wow. Like, this is great. Like, I like neuroscience, I like stories. And it was so disappointing. And I just got this feeling of like, what do to, to the point I was making before, like what are we doing? Like, are we.
By like going into the brain and like measuring neurons and fi like can that actually tell us anything about like storytelling and like how to tell a better story? But there might be other perspectives that have come along since then. Yeah. And so I’m curious, like in this space, like to you, what is the potential of looking inside of a brain in terms of like understanding how stories work for people?
Sara Grady: Um, so I think for me, and this is partly because of the limitations of what neuroscience is and can do, right? It’s not like you have one neuron that does certain types of thinking, um, is, is trying to understand. What is, I was talking before about this between subjects differences, what is similar for all of us and so most of the work that I’ve ever done collaborating with neuroscientists is looking at what is called an intersubject correlation.
And so that is essentially you are taking brain scans with a bunch of different people who are all watching the same movie or listening to the same audio book or whatever kind of media we happen to be studying. And we look and see how similar their brain patterns are as a, as a signifier of entrainment.
And so there are a couple of different ways to do the math of that, but essentially we’re looking to see how much commonality is there among the audience members tells us that that message is going in and being processed in a similar way. And so you can’t, like the really early studies 20 years ago, were looking at like if you are watching a movie, your visual cortex is doing the same thing for everyone because the same photons are being lit.
They’re like, great, cool. Sure. That’s a really good proof of concept for this kind of analysis. But the work that. We’ve been doing in these last couple of papers is asking about our, um, default mode network and our social cognitive systems and saying, okay, we know from years of research that there are certain parts of the brain that are recruited to think about social interactions, think about other people.
Um, things like theory of mind and perspective taking and where we’re trying to understand other people’s thoughts and, and feelings. Do those same systems when we’re. Looking at movies work the same way. Do I think about an intuit, a character’s motivations, actions, beliefs, the same way I would a real person.
And so we can see the same processes you would see in interpersonal, social, cognitive processes are online during movies, and they’re in fact more entrained among groups of people than other areas of the brain that aren’t associated with that kind of thing.
Andy Luttrell: Can I pause you? You’re saying entrained. What is that?
What is that about?
Sara Grady: It’s just kind of being in sync. So we’re looking over time. Um, one of the, one of the papers that we did was looking over the course of a story and we had this idea, if you remember like in seventh grade, you do this basic story arc, right? There’s a beginning and a rising action and this climax.
And so we were interested to see does the amount of similarity across the audience’s brains increase the more story information they’ve taken on? Because in theory, we all come in and you’ve got something on your mind and I’m thinking about something else. And we see more diversity early on. And then people get kind of more in sync as the story goes on up to the climax, where in theory, everyone’s kind of all hanging on the same moment, the same set of actions.
Um, and not only that, but we see. Less similarity the younger the audience is. So in little kids who don’t have highly developed theory of mind and are not necessarily as attentive to media as, as other adult, adult audiences would be, we don’t see the same kind of entrainment or synchronization among the audience, which indicates this is a sort of social process that we’ve learned over time and that we seem to be able to do if we’re all watching movies.
But the cool thing is because an FM I machine is this giant magnet, these people’s brains are doing the same thing. Even though they were, all, the data was collected on different days, sometimes in different places. So that synchronicity is linked to the movie. Even if you watch them months or even years apart.
Uh, and you can actually see this, I’m getting little off my own work, but there’s some really cool research that looks at people who listen to the same audio book in different languages. Mm. And so their language and auditory cortexes are doing different things ’cause they have actual different. Sounds going into their brains, right?
But in their higher order, sort of frontal cortex, we see a lot of the synchronization because the story is the same, the characters are the same, and so some of the higher order functions are consistent across languages, even though the actual physical properties of the audio are very, very different.
Andy Luttrell: Hmm. The fact that it’s not as clear for kids is actually really helpful, like as a finding, because otherwise you could say. Well, yeah, like you’re just watching the same thing, like why wouldn’t you have the same experience? But the fact that it like comes along a little bit later in the developmental trajectory means that like, no, it’s not a foregone conclusion that like brains are just gonna like rally around the same bit of content, right?
Like this is kind of like a socially sophisticated thing that develops over time. It’s reminding me, I just watched the new Wilson Grommet movie with my 4-year-old and there was a lot of explaining what was going on every moment, why, why is this happening And well this, this person wanted this and that person wanted that.
And so it’s resonating very much that like, oh, like, yeah, like this is kind of peculiar thing. That exists. Like evolutionarily we’re not, we weren’t like destined to make movies, but it makes a lot of sense that like they hijack a lot of those things that our brains develop to do. And we can do it in the same moments, even if it’s, it’s not like a shared experience.
Right. But it’s just like, uh, we lock in in the same sort of way to this media. Yeah.
Sara Grady: And I think there are interesting, bigger picture questions about is, is that some of what these functions are, even though there’s an individual level, right, of why I’m choosing this movie, why did movies develop, why do they exist?
They are. You can use the language of they’re hijacking these existing brain functions, but you can also think about it in terms of some kind of training or practice function, right? It’s sort of the dojo of us getting to do all this social stuff in a low stakes environment where there’s no effects, but like we get to practice and process and understand these things.
And is that actually fundamentally what these, in some ways, movies are kinda helping us build those skills and engines of social processing.
Andy Luttrell: Hmm. Whose idea was it to make the stimulus, the Pixar short, partly cloudy.
Sara Grady: Uh, so that study was actually a secondary data set. Mm-hmm. So it existed. There’s so in neuroscience, and I wish all all social scientists did this, there’s a really great tradition of sharing data sets because they’re so expensive and it takes so long to make them so open.
Neuro is a database essentially of any dataset that people have collected. F-M-R-I-E-E-G-I think a little bit of ners is in there, um, where they’ve used any kinda stimuli and they just put all of the data and say, Hey, this is what we count, we found, use it however you wanna use it. And so. This dataset existed of a bunch of people of all different ages watching this picture short, partly cloudy.
And this idea of how over the course of the story, it might change, isn’t something neuroscientists look at. Like, I’d meet with neuroscientists and they’re just like, a movie’s, a movie. We’ll just throw on some old movies like, Hmm, let’s talk about it. Um, and so we could ask some questions about this stimuli, how it develops in really specific ways that I don’t think the original authors had ever intended, but the data was there.
Let’s use it.
Andy Luttrell: I I was jazzed about it. In part it also serves narratively for the podcast interview because. My out of high school, I went to art school to study animation for similar kinds of reasons. Like I was interested in storytelling and using these sort of like technical media to bring these sorts of, uh, movies to life.
And the, the grand goal would’ve always been to land to Pixar. But, you know, very quickly I realized like, oh, I don’t wanna spend three weeks on five seconds of footage that may or may not end up in the movie. But like that same interest of like, well, how, how are we conveying. Thing, ideas to other people and like what is sort of the grand implication of what we’re doing.
And so I just, I do just kinda relish this full circle moment of like coming back at the end year where that, that was the stimulus in that, in that study.
Sara Grady: Well, that’s great. Yeah, and I think animation is a, we’ve been using it a couple of other studies right now because it is so purposely designed, right?
Especially if you think about the anthropomorphic animals or plants or cars, especially in a Pixar movie, like how do they convey. A personness in this object and the way that they use facial features and colors and movement to do that, I think tells us a lot about how we convey that information because they do a ton of work about why and how specific features should convey certain kinds of information, which is really rich and interesting
Andy Luttrell: and it’s it just to the, to bring it all back home.
Like it, it makes so much sense that it’s so interesting that. To the point of we’re using media to kinda learn how to be human. Mm-hmm. Like, it’s, it’s curious that like we’re able to pull that off even with these sort of anthropomorphic depictions. Like they’re still helpful in like kind of creating this social reality, this shared reality that we have with other people sharing those media.
Yeah.
Sara Grady: It’s kinda beautiful.
Andy Luttrell: Yeah. Well, okay, well we’ll end it there and I’ll say thank you pretty much for being here with me talking about this stuff. Uh, I’ll be interested to see where, where all this stuff is headed too.
Sara Grady: Me too.
