By: Francesca Gino

Growing up on a Missouri farm, Walt Disney developed a love for drawing after his neighbor, a retired doctor known as “Doc” Sherwood, paid him to draw pictures of his horse.

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Disney later became a newspaper cartoonist and commercial artist, where he learned how to make commercials from cutout animations. His fascination with animation inspired him to establish his own cartoon studio and eventually become the face of the golden age of animation.

I heard this story during my onboarding process when I worked as a research consultant at Disney Imagineering a few years ago. In the weeks after I heard the story, I found my mind returning to it whenever I was feeling uninspired by the work I was doing.

Examples like this one illustrate how even simple stories can be an effective source of inspiration. In fact, they can be even more powerful than that: stories can influence our decisions and behavior. By presenting vivid examples of people who faced the challenges we face, they not only last across time but also are contagious.

That behavior is contagious is a well-known finding in psychological research, even in contexts in which we believe our actions are primarily determined by our internal motivation. Consider the case of dishonesty. Simply seeing another person cheat can lead us to cheat, even if we care about being honest. My colleagues Shahar Ayal, Dan Ariely, and I demonstrated this in a series of laboratory studies.

In one study, we asked a group of college students to solve 20 math problems in a very short time. No one could realistically solve all the problems within the allotted time. We told participants that we would pay them for whatever problems they reported they had solved. The money they could earn was placed in an envelope on their desks. After the allotted time was up, students were supposed to check their own performance, pay themselves, shred the test, and leave. The math task, however, was just a pretense for the real experiment, which concerned cheating.

Shortly after the students began working on the problems, one of them (a paid actor) announced to the room: “I’ve solved everything. What should I do?” Everyone in the room knew this was impossible and concluded that he had blatantly cheated. He also took all of the cash available to him, as if he had achieved a perfect score, and left without any consequences.

Seeing their presumed peer cheat increased the overall level of cheating in the room. We were able to conclude this by comparing the students’ self-reported performance (which, on average, was equal to about 15 math problems out of 20) to that of students in a control condition (which, on average, was seven math problems), where there was neither an actor nor a shredding machine. One of the people conducting the experiment checked students’ work before paying them. We replicated the same finding in later studies that used a fake shredding machine (so that we could determine for sure that people cheated by over-reporting their performance).

The morale of the experiment: dishonesty can be contagious when we witness one of our own engaging in unethical behavior.

Behavior can be contagious even when it’s simply described in a story. Organizational founders and executives often share their own stories and examples of past behavior in their companies. Examples abound. At McKinsey, employees are highly familiar with stories about long-time managing director Marvin Bower’s integrity, and at Starbucks, stories are widely told about CEO Howard Schultz’s commitment to employee welfare. Stories can also come from employees low on the organizational hierarchy. At Ritz-Carlton hotels, for instance, employees widely share stories about doormen, cleaning, and maintenance staff, and other employees going above and beyond for customers or for one another.

These stories are positive examples of organizational members upholding company values. Others are stories in which the protagonist violated the organization’s values. In a recent field experiment conducted by Sean Martin of Boston College, over 600 newly hired employees at a large IT firm were presented with stories of organizational members as part of their onboarding process. Some stories had a main character who occupied a high-level position in the company. Others were about a person in a low-level position. In addition, the stories varied on whether the protagonist engaged in behaviors that upheld or deviated from the organization’s values.

The result: stories about low-level organizational members engaging in values-upholding behaviors were more likely to encourage similarly positive behaviors and reduce deviant actions than those about high-level organizational members. But when the stories were about organizational members engaging in deviant behaviors, fewer value-upholding behaviors were observed if the story was about a high-level rather than a low-level member. It seems we are especially lifted up by stories of those at the bottom behaving generously and particularly discouraged by stories about higher-ups misbehaving.

Even reading works of fiction can have a marked influence on a person’s behavior. Research by Geoff Kaufman of Dartmouth College and Lisa Libby of Ohio State University found that individuals who lose themselves in the world of a character often alter their attitudes and thoughts to resemble those of the made-up person. “Experience-taking” — that is, feeling the emotions, beliefs, and internal responses of those we are reading about — can lead to real changes in the lives of readers. In one study, participants who related strongly to a character who worked hard in order to be able to vote were more likely to take part in a poll themselves.

Telling and listening to stories are traditional, even ancient, means of passing on wisdom and culture. As the research I’ve discussed suggests, stories can help organizations more effectively communicate both simple and complex knowledge about values, norms, and the solutions to difficult problems. In most organizations, there are plenty of untapped stories that could be told that would change behavior for the better.

About I.C. Collins

I.C. Collins is grateful that he can pursue something that is both interesting and has value on several levels. For over three decades in the Automotive Sales Industry a bottom-line guy Collins doesn't shy away from telling the truth in ways that cut through the noise to deliver streetwise and corporate knowledge from someone who's been there and done that, many times over.

He aims to create “a long-lasting major brand that for generations is a company that is business-critical to the leading brands in the world. We are focused every day on creating something that’s valuable and has permanence.”

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