Welcome to the Story Rules Project!

We are laser-focused on translating the new science of story into actionable rules for high-impact storytelling in the age of polarization.

Lethal Mass Partisanship

There is only one thing Americans can agree on these days: The American experiment is spiralling into a dangerous endgame.

• Over 40 percent of Republicans and Democrats believe that members of the other party are not simply wrong — they are “downright evil.”

• About half that number believes members of the other political party are not fully human, and that the country would be better off if large numbers of the opposition were to die.

• 19 percent of voters report that politics has hurt their friendships and family relationships.

We are now so sharply polarized that partisan political affiliation defines our lives, distorting our perceptions and disrupting our capacity to tolerate difference. Political scientists Nathan Kalmoe and Lilliana Mason call this “lethal mass partisanship,” a term that evokes not simply the murderous impulses of people living in our hyper-partisan republic, but also the manner in which hyper-partisanship threatens the republic itself.

Democracies Die By Suicide

More than two centuries ago, John Adams observed that "there hasn't yet been a democracy that didn't die by suicide.” George Washington, in his Farewell Address, described how democracies kill themselves through extreme partisanship: “It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption.” We’re there.

Trust in institutions is disappearing — left and right are losing faith in government, the press, the justice system, science, and the electoral process, regarding them as tools that the other side is manipulating for political gain. Even facts are different depending on what your politics are: Over 70 percent of Americans note that Republicans and Democrats can’t even agree on basic facts. We can’t have a functioning democracy if no one trusts the press, the justice system, or the government. We can’t have a functioning democracy if we can’t engage in reasoned debate that is grounded in fact. When those things fall apart, all that’s left is tribalism and warfare — the “animosity .. riot and insurrection” Washington warned against.

The future of our republic is on the line. Not because of what the left is doing, or what the right is doing, but because of what hyper-partisanship from both sides is doing to destabilize our capacity to live together, peacefully, as a diverse, vibrant people. Internally, we’re imploding. We’re seeing it in political gridlock, riots and looting, paralysis and pandering, cancel culture and fearful conformity, and a press that has abandoned even the pretense of objective reporting. This implosion, in turn, makes us vulnerable. It’s a matter of national security. Hostile foreign actors are exploiting our polarization with the goal of weakening us from within. Hence Russia’s penchant for issuing fake news around our most divisive issues; hence, too, its covert backing of polarizing political candidates on the left and the right. 

Welcome to the Doom Loop

We are in a “doom loop,” which political analyst Lee Drutman defines as a “self-reinforcing dynamic in which … the more the two parties take strongly opposing positions, the more different they appear. And the more different they appear, the more the other party comes to feel like a genuine existential threat to the other.”

The doom loop is suicidal. It’s our political death spiral. Polarization is tearing America apart — and yet we feel helpless to do anything about it. It’s not what we want. It’s not who we are. And yet: This is who we are becoming.

Story is the Answer

There is a solution, one as old and strong as humanity itself: story. For millennia, powerful stories have united us, uplifted us, inspired us. They can do so again today.

New discoveries in neuroscience show us how stories act upon the brain, revealing critical insights about how we are wired. Stories are powerful engines of belonging and cooperation. They can bring people together where argument and persuasion fail. They can help us overcome our differences, enlarging and enriching our sense of "tribe.” Story is, in short, the brain’s tool of connection.

The Story Rules Project is founded on two interlocking goals: 1) Understanding how story affects the brain; and 2) Exploring how the science of story empowers us to bring about the change we need.

Please Join Us!

This substack is a testing ground for our ideas, a sandbox for discovery, play, and experimentation. It is also educational and urgent — we need to understand these things as a society, if we want to do better and be better, and we need to understand them now, before it’s too late. Most of all, the Story Rules Project is a celebration of storytelling — its timeless beauty, its endless variety, its structural mystery, and its deep, biochemical power to sustain us in times of trouble, to guide us in moments of doubt, to make us stronger when we are weak, to ground us when we are lost, and to bring us together when we are falling apart.

Here, we’ll write about what story is, how it works on our brains, how it functions socially as a mechanism for creating — and sometimes destroying — community and connection, and how we might enlist it to repair our social wounds.

We’ll write about what stories can do, psychologically, socially, and politically, and what they cannot do. We will examine the mechanism by which story anchors, aids, and causes social change, from the vantage points of evolutionary biology, neuroscience and body chemistry, individual minds and group psychology. We’ll study examples of stories that have had tremendous social impact — for better, and, sometimes, for worse — and we’ll look at stories that were meant to make a difference, but did not. 

Along the way, we’ll write about the states of mind that are most conducive to harmony, connection, and cooperation — to helping us come together across our differences — especially awe, curiosity, empathy, and intellectual humility. We will look at how story can be used to produce and propagate those states. And we will consider how story may even make it possible for us to recover mental states that are necessary to our humanity and our democracy, but that we are actively and catastrophically losing our ability to access.

We will also be doing a lot of storytelling ourselves. Please join us.

The Story Rules Project is a division of the Story Incubator Writing Lab, a 501c3 nonprofit devoted to healing partisan divides with the most powerful unifying technology we have — story.

Who we are

We are Erin O’Connor, PhD, and Maurice Black, PhD. Between us, we have over half a century of experience, grit, skill, and hard-won expertise with stories and the people who tell them.

Erin is a writer, film producer, and creative consultant. She is best known as writer and producer of the award-winning 2019 film Miss Virginia, starring Emmy® winner Uzo Aduba (Orange Is the New Black) and Golden Globe winner Matthew Modine (Stranger Things). Called a “must-see” by USA Today, the film has aired on BET and Netflix. Today.com has recommended Miss Virginia as a great film to watch on Mother’s Day.

Films Erin has worked on have received a wide range of awards, including the Berlin Crystal Bear, the Academy Nicholl Prize, the Oscar shortlist for documentary feature, and an Oscar nomination for best documentary short. She is co-founder of The Story Incubator Writing Lab, a nonprofit talent incubator and micro-think tank dedicated to healing our partisan divide through storytelling.

Before moving into film and television, Erin was a professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, where she specialized in narrative, the history of ideas, and cultural theory. Her book Raw Material: Producing Pathology in Victorian Culture has been called “a superb and provocative study,” “a tour de force,” and “one of the year’s most provocative and challenging books.”

Erin is currently developing several screenplays and writing a book on cancel culture. 

Maurice is a film producer and creative consultant who works with writers and filmmakers to create powerful, impactful stories that drive change, growth, and success. He is co-founder of The Story Incubator Writing Lab, a nonprofit talent incubator and micro-think tank dedicated to healing our partisan divide through storytelling.

He served as producer on Miss Virginia, where he played key roles during development, post-production, and impact planning. He executive produced Incarcerating US, a feature-length documentary about over-incarceration and criminal justice reform, and Laura Waters Hinson’s Mama Rwanda, an acclaimed short documentary about Rwandan women harnessing the power of entrepreneurship to rebuild their shattered post-genocide economy. He has contributed to film and video productions that reached tens of millions of young people and won industry awards. 

Maurice earned his doctorate in English literature from the University of Pennsylvania, where he specialized in literary modernism. Previously, he was an editor at Penguin Random House, where he worked on titles by authors including John Irving, Michael Crichton, and Anne Rice.

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