Episode description:

Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about truth, disinformation, and the media with Eric Schoenberg, a longtime journalist and media executive, now the founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media. Most people think of America’s political divisions as based in political ideology, red versus blue, liberal versus conservative. But what if we’re misunderstanding the fault lines?

Today’s guests, Brian Waniewski, the CEO of Harmony Labs and Melody Mohebi of Democracy 2076, have spent the past two years collaborating on a study of how to get Americans to engage with politics. The key lever they identified wasn’t policy arguments, but rather stories. Their report, The Power of Story to Grow Democracy, and we’ll link to it in the show notes, analyzes hundreds of popular films and shows.

It runs dozens of randomized experiences with more than 10,000 participants and what they found was striking. Americans today may seem irreconcilable, and tend to converge on what they actually want from democracy. A system that is fair, representative and effective. Where they differ is the set of values that move them towards those goals. Values that are revealed by the stories that resonate with them.

Americans that prioritize particular values tend to respond to particular narratives, particular kinds of heroes, particular story arcs, particular visions of change. Now, the conclusion of this report, which Eric found very interesting as a media guy, is how we frame the news, and how we frame our telling of American history can matter more in healing divisions than arguing over facts.

Dig into this more in the conversation coming up with Brian Waniewski and Melody Mohebi.

 

Transcript

 

Eric (00:01.71)
Brian and Melody, welcome to In Reality.

Brian Waniewski (00:05.028)
Thanks, Eric. It’s great to be here with you.

 

Eric (00:06.89)
It’s great to have you. We’re going to talk today about your research report, The Power of Story to Grow Democracy, in which, broadly speaking, you concluded that different kinds of narratives in popular culture inspire different kinds of audiences to feel a sense of agency in promoting democracy, broadly speaking. Your research focused on movies and streaming series, but it struck me that it has implications for news media.

looking to reach new audiences or political advocates, trying to understand political division or neighbors, just trying to talk across political divides or anyone who wants to be aware of how to appeal outside their own political bubble. So let me start with a basic question. Your research tested over 300, I’m sorry, 30 narrative arcs to 10,000 people.

Why did you focus on narratives, storytelling? What about that entry point into the political conversation is a good way to point to understanding about the American political mindset? Melody, you want to take that question first?

Melody Mohebi (01:25.159)
Sure. I think with just the background that I’ve had looking in the social impact space, wherever I work, whatever issue area I worked, whatever topic, it always came back to stories, whether it was the news, whether it was documentaries, whether it was entertainment, stories were always at the center of what really shapes people’s beliefs about things. And so when it came to democracy, Democracy 2076 has always believed that what does it mean?

How do we know that the stories that we are watching every day, especially when it comes to entertainment, how do they affect us at a basic level? And so that’s why we decided to partner with Harmony Labs to really understand what was at the core of it and what was shaping different types of people.

Eric (02:07.374)
OK, is there a psychological leverage here? Like, the story has a particular power to change what someone believes, whereas a factual argument really doesn’t.

Brian Waniewski (02:20.301)
Yeah, totally. mean, if think about human beings, we’re meaning-making machines.

and we tend to package the meanings we make inside of stories. We do this without effort, without intention. It’s just what we do. We walk into a store and someone says or does something and we’re immediately building a story in our head about why that happened and why it matters and how it fits into the rest of our life. So humans make sense of the world and each other through stories. That’s just kind of a given. That’s how we’re wired. And in terms of how we receive information,

when we receive information inside of a story, there’s all sorts of research that shows that the recall is better, the sort of effectiveness is better, versus giving someone statistics or facts or other kinds of things.

Eric (03:08.878)
That’s why journalists always start stories with anecdotal leads. Now, Harmony has divided Americans into four audience types.

Brian Waniewski (03:13.11)
Absolutely.

Eric (03:21.144)
you’ve given them clever names, people power, tough cookies, don’t tread on me, and if you say so, the categories are based on values rather than party affiliation. Can you walk us through what those categories actually mean and why you feel like a values-based map is more useful than the traditional democratic, republican, conservative, liberal divide?

Brian Waniewski (03:45.966)
Yeah, mean when we were making this audience segmentation, which we’ve used for six years now across all the different issue areas that we’ve worked on, we were really interested in a segmentation that could help us describe the lived experience of people.

and not just their attitudes towards specific issues when they’re answering surveys that experts like us ask them to answer. So there are lots of different ways, different psychological constructs that you could imagine using to do something like that. We chose to use these values, which are a specific set of values developed by Scholem Schwartz, called his Universal Theory of Human Values.

because they had good psychometric properties, could reliably fit other psychological constructs inside of them.

They produced a limited number of groups that were kind of easy for people to hold in their head. We could sort people into those groups with just four ranked choice survey questions. So they had really good properties. But the most important thing that caused us to choose this values-based framework was that it was the most predictive framework we found for the media choices people were making in their lives. And Harmony Labs at Harmony Labs were interested in how media affects people and their attitudes about different issues. And so that was a good thing for us.

Eric (04:57.39)
Mm-hmm.

Brian Waniewski (05:05.979)
So, yeah, we have four basic values quadrants. They’re arranged on an X, Y axis. On the X axis, we have on the left side folks who tend to have more communitarian values, who tend to focus more on the we of things. On the right of the X axis, we have folks who are more individually focused, more into self-optimization kind of values. And then on the vertical axis down at the bottom, we have folks who

have more prevention of loss values, which we refer to as preserve and protect values. And then up at the top we have promotion of gain values, which we refer to as strive and create. So this creates those four values quadrants that each have a sort of core value, they have a bunch of subsidiary values. But it gives people a way of conceptualizing people, other people who have values that are really different from their own, and to think about the stories that might be able to reach them.

them.

Eric (06:07.658)
OK, it strikes me that the four quadrants do map rather closely to other things that are more common ways of segmenting audiences. So Republicans tend to be in the bottom half of the graph and Democrats on the upper. Men to the left, perhaps. No, sorry, women to the left, men to the right.

But the values is a very useful thing, particularly for the research that we’ll be talking about today. One thing about the conclusions of your research was, well, let me put it that way. If you sort of look at the broad range of research about polarization in the US, you get some very different results. On the pessimistic side, Pew, for example, increasing ideological sorting within

like meaning Republicans and Democrats don’t even want to live in the same state and dismiss each other as not being just wrong, but like being immoral. And then there are other researchers like Moran Common that suggests that Americans perceive people on the other side of the political divide as being more extreme than they actually are. I read your results as leaning more towards the more in common.

side of this debate, that Americans may be misunderstanding each other more than they are profoundly disagreeing about the democracy they envision. Is that right, Melody?

Melody Mohebi (07:50.248)
I would say so. think one of the beauties of working within these value systems is, you you mentioned that, there are some places from the demographic side that they may over index in certain values, but you find different people, different demographics in all of these values at the same time. And so it helps us look at our differences in a different way. I we all have parts of these values at all times of day, but this is where we’re kind of like strongly, you know, we might be more community oriented.

more broadly or authority more broadly, but we are able to understand those different sides better. And so this takes us out of this kind of binary of are you on the left or are you on the right kind of thinking. And I think it also helps that it makes the boundaries a little bit more porous. So it might be that someone might say, I listen to this kind of website or like I listen to this type of news only and I definitely disagree with. But when it comes to, let’s say entertainment,

you’re a lot more likely to say that like, hey, this is more my type of show, but I’m also willing to watch a show that someone who’s kind of more, know, on the, you say so side watches, even if you’re kind of diagonal on the spectrum of your values.

Eric (08:59.982)
So let’s walk us through how these different segments map to different kinds of narratives. So what are the kinds of heroes or narratives that appeal to the four different audience kinds?

Melody Mohebi (09:20.391)
can take that one and then Brian you can add on as well. So looking back on this axis, these axes that Brian just mentioned, so you have, know, from the left to right, kind of the me, like community oriented, those are people that are really drawn to insider heroes, heroes that are working within systems. And on the right hand side, the people that are more individually oriented, the heroes that resonate with them are the outsiders. And then thinking of the top half, the top half, you know, with the community folks and the autonomy folks,

They’re the ones that are really thinking about change as a type of transformation. Whereas those on the bottom half are thinking about change as a type of restoration to basic values. And it’s all about how we kind of interpret that type of change and that type of hero. those are the heroes that resonate with each different value in the stories.

Eric (10:08.792)
Can you give us some examples, Melody, just drawn from well-known popular movies or streamers?

Melody Mohebi (10:15.507)
Sure. So if we’re thinking about kind of an insider transformer who pushes systems forward from within, let’s think about Ted Lasso. That’s someone, you know, and we’re talking, it’s not a government system, but it is a system of a sports. Diagonally on the authority side, someone who’s kind of thinking about an outsider restore, something like Reacher, who’s a former account military police trying to change things.

Eric (10:43.822)
The research suggests that a character who appeals to one audience, so a hero to one audience, might be a villain to someone else on the values map. Why do some audiences like, just to use your example, an insider like Ted Lasso fighting for a better world, while others prefer the Reacher type of hero?

Brian, you want to take that? Psychological question.

Brian Waniewski (11:12.024)
Gosh, if I knew the answer to that question, I don’t know if I’d be talking to you right now. I’d have a really successful movie studio or something. Yeah, I mean, you you can think about values as just kind of goals we live by. And so…

Eric (11:16.738)
We’ll get there, or on the predictions tomorrow.

Brian Waniewski (11:31.49)
you know, the happy endings we have can be viewed as kind of just an expression of our values and the heroes that pursue those happy endings can be the end that we identify.

can be the agents of acquiring those happy endings. so, you know, it kind of makes sense that someone who’s looking for transformation from a communitarian lens is really gonna gravitate towards something like The West Wing or Madame Secretary or these shows that show characters working inside of a system to make a sort of more inclusive manifestation of that system.

Eric (12:14.062)
Sure. Sure.

Of the point of the research was not just what do people find entertaining, but what actually changes their attitudes about democracy and changes their thinking and making them feel like they have more agency in democracy’s future. So what are the characteristics of stories that actually move people to feel confident that they can make a change or that there is a positive

path forward to democracy. What are the characteristics of those kinds of

Melody Mohebi (12:52.153)
just start with talking about kind of our narrative arc that we developed with Harmony Labs and that’s kind of the change that we were kind of hoping for. it’s what are people drawn to and then what moves them. And what moves them is we’re kind of looking at three areas. One is are they recognizing that there’s a problem with our democracy? Are they feeling a sense of agency that they’re able to do something about it? And finally, are they able to have kind of an increased imagination for what the future of democracy can look like?

Eric (12:57.41)
Okay.

Melody Mohebi (13:21.649)
And so the baseline numbers, found a lot of people recognize that there’s a problem, but we’re at 50 % of people who believe that they have some sort of agency to change things and only a third have that imagination for the future. And so every arc is about the hero type that resonates with them and how can it move them on that kind of over through that arc. So it’s about, is there a catalyst that helps them see the problem? Is there some sort of change that the hero is going through? And then finally, what’s that resolution?

and that arc is different for each hero type. If it’s helpful, I can kind of go through for one of them. So for example, the insider transformer that resonates with the people power and community oriented folks, they’re looking at something where, you know, a system is excluding or oppressing communities. And then there’s an insider who’s exposing the flaws and reshaping the institutions so that ultimately you have more equitable power distribution. Then diagonally across from that,

Eric (13:56.878)
Sure, yeah, please.

Melody Mohebi (14:20.015)
outsider restorer who are the more authority minded folks, they’re, know, the catalyst is citizens are being victimized by a corrupt institution. Then this outsider hero comes in and exposes that corruption, going back to first principles, and ultimately you have transparency and accountability restored. And so it’s how are different people kind of going through that arc, seeing that their hero go through that arc.

Eric (14:44.704)
Okay, good. And so the end state, it seems, is always some kind of transformation that leads to a more democratic environment, even though we’re not always or even most of the time talking about government specifically. Are there kinds of narrative arcs that don’t work to move people along that spectrum?

Melody Mohebi (15:13.093)
I would say there are two kind of key factors. One is that you always have to have someone trying. So if someone gives up and you kind of let the system take over, that’s really problematic. That’s where we see kind of a drop off rate. And also if you’re not actually like, and it’s really helpful to show some sort of future. Another factor is when kind of a hero falls from grace and they stop being seen as a hero by that person. So this might be that, you

Let’s say for the border crowd where they suddenly end up maintaining, like deciding that maintaining order is more important and they let order kind of overcompensate for justice and silencing dissent. For that kind of audience, they stop seeing that as a hero and that’s kind of problematic for a democracy because you always need someone else to take up that mantle for democracy.

Eric (16:06.37)
I can imagine. So what’s an example of that kind of narrative from popular?

Melody Mohebi (16:14.045)
Good question. I think, you know, I wouldn’t say like there’s a full art, like, you know, like one of a movie, but there are storylines within, let’s say a TV show. Let’s say you’re thinking about blue bloods. And we have this in our report where Frank Reagan is kind of being constantly torn between kind of supporting your officers, maintaining loyalty versus holding them accountable. And if he kind of really overemphasizes on order, that’s when there’s kind of a, you start questioning the kind of his motivations.

Eric (16:43.852)
All right, it struck me that one of the kinds of not pro-democracy, not helpful narratives is one you called the system is rigged. What happens in a system is rigged Brian?

Brian Waniewski (17:00.407)
Yeah, I the system is rigged is a a idea that came from frameworks Institute and they’ve been doing a lot of survey work over the last I six or seven years and Seeing the number of Americans who believe the system is rigged and really can’t be unrigged growing growing growing growing I think now its latest latest count was up to seven year 80 % so, you know this this is a an idea of whatever system we’re dealing with as being sort of in in

inexorably corrupt, like no exit sort of situation, no matter what the characters might do to exit it. yeah, don’t, Melody, I don’t know if you can think of any system as read stories off the top of your head, but I’m drawing a blank. I mean, they don’t make for great drama. Yeah, which ones?

Melody Mohebi (17:52.058)
I think this is…

Eric (17:53.519)
I can think of a few. mean, succession, popular, Breaking Bad, arguably. So there is definitely a kind of dark side to some forms of entertainment success. neither of those narratives leave you particularly optimistic about positive transformation.

Brian Waniewski (18:01.335)
Hmm.

you

Eric (18:22.744)
but they still were successful for Hollywood.

Brian Waniewski (18:26.497)
Well, it’s funny that one of the things that was difficult about this work, which the two examples you shared brings to the fore, is that you have shows which have an overall arc and a sort of vibe to them.

but they also have lots of series inside of those things in which people are trying and succeeding and all sorts of different things are happening. And so in doing this work, we had to kind of make a choice of whether to focus on the individual little story arcs that happen like in a larger series or to focus on the overall vibe and where we ended up with focusing on this sort of smaller story arcs where you do see a lot of movement even if the sort of larger vibe of the show is like pretty dystopic or dark or.

Eric (19:10.06)
No. All right. I get that. I do want to ask you about the durability of these effects. So Melody, you described people moving along this arc from recognizing a problem to envisioning a positive future. And you’ve measured those shifts. So I can imagine that someone watches a story about insider transformation and feels

more civic agency and feels positive about a future vision. But I wonder how long the feeling lasts. it survive their next exposure to rage baiting on social media or the next partisan news site?

Melody Mohebi (19:58.388)
That’s a great question and I do hope that we continue to do this research and you know, hopefully Brian I’d love to also hear if you all are continuing to work on this but I think for us from someone who works in kind of in the media space it’s always about the drum beat because like you said you watch one thing and then there’s another thing and you the way kind of you are with streaming where you kind of watch a show and you might not even remember exactly what happened but the feelings stay with you.

And that’s why it’s so important that we have this constant drumbeat. It’s not about finding that one movie that’s going to change the world. It’s what’s the entertainment that you’re constantly exposed to on a daily or weekly or monthly basis so that it kind of maintains that hope and that sense of agency.

Eric (20:42.83)
Okay, all right.

Brian Waniewski (20:43.478)
Yeah, it wasn’t part of this work to look at longitudinal effects, which is true for most of the studies we do. It’s it’s kind of prohibitively expensive to do that. We haven’t, we did that, I last time we did that was like in 2018 for some work about the effects of VR on people.

Eric (21:00.206)
OK, so let’s hope we come back to this, because the thesis is so interesting. Now, the research focused on popular culture. But it strikes me, as a media guy, that one of the more continuous sources of narrative exposure is news. And there, given the incentives that are built into what appeals

people reading news is that the tendency is to emphasize the dramatic and the…

Eric (21:40.6)
to emphasize the most extreme cases, because that’s what is defined as newsworthy. How would you suggest media changes its practices in light of your research?

Brian Waniewski (21:51.735)
That’s a really interesting question.

Yeah, there’s been a lot of work in journalism to reflect on the sort of problem focused structure of how we tell journalistic stories, solutions journalism network comes to mind. Trying to make sure that we always have a solution inside of that story, that we always have a sort of a future inside of the story. I it depends what kind of story you’re telling, whether this is actually possible or not. But generally becoming more

cognizant of the effects of the story you’re telling on your audiences, I think would be a good thing for everyone. I mean, all of us who make media and put media into the world, whether it’s the angry tweet at 12 a.m. or the story that millions of people read or the movie, you know, it’s consequential to express something and to…

run it through a system that amplifies it to millions of people. And so I think the more all of us can become sort of cognizant of the responsibility that we have in doing that, the better.

Eric (23:01.176)
Yeah, I think that’s a great point, Brian. And I would say that one of the things that I often try to remind my writers about was the power that they had to affect people’s lives. And that was a responsibility that we really had to pay attention to. And also, to just amplify what you said, all of us are nodes in the information ecosystem.

we spread our reaction to news, whether we share something without knowing whether it’s really true or just because we’re angry, we’re not contributing to the solution when we do that. And also, this is a good place to perhaps prompt a mention of the Solutions Journalism Network, which is a style of journalism that emphasizes focusing on solutions.

or making sure that successes are also newsworthy and not just disasters. One thing that strikes me about this research, which is so interesting and so helpful in understanding across political divides and also reminding people in my profession about the impact they have, is that it

to go into effect, it seems to assume that the goal of people in the entertainment industry or media is to promote democracy. And yet, if you can make money making streaming series like Succession or Squid Game, there’s another one, which I hadn’t brought up. Why not do that? Why should you prioritize democracy? And similarly, if

Your goal as a media organization is to give people facts that help them make better decisions about their lives and also to build your audience. Why does the impact that you’re gonna have in growing democracy become part of your calculation? Why should it?

Brian Waniewski (25:19.414)
I mean, part of the reason I think we undertook this work together with Democracy 2076 was that, you know, when we’d have conversations with people who were making media, they would kind of trot out the argument that you just trotted out. It’s like, I’m doing this thing. What does this thing have to do with democracy? I can’t think about one more thing when I’m doing my thing. And we were curious, like, OK, is it true that

that a lot of the media that’s being made and streaming media in particular actually has nothing to do with government right now. And what we’ve found in this research, you know, is that it actually is not true. Like 60 % of the stories that are reaching people on a daily basis have to do in some way with government or government systems. And so, you know, these stories that affect people’s democracy attitudes are not rare.

Eric (25:54.04)
Mm-hmm.

Brian Waniewski (26:13.685)
They’re not unpopular and they don’t not make for really good content. And so the fact is that these stories are already being told and we just might want to bring a little bit more awareness to the effects that these stories are having on people. Why should we do that? You know, there are certain advantages to operating a business in a democracy that I think as maybe some of those.

parts of democracy that we have taken for granted for so many years start to erode, we’ll start to become more conscious of. So I think keeping a good social environment, a good democratic environment for us all to relate to each other inside of and do business inside of is in everyone’s best interest. Melody, what do you think? You have a great perspective on this.

Melody Mohebi (27:00.083)
Yeah, I would say two points because, we end up talking to a lot of studios, filmmakers, writers and everything. One being that, you know, the first question that we asked with this research was what are people naturally watching? And so we actually ended up understanding a lot about what about what aspects of a story actually draws people in. And so from a craft perspective, we’re actually seeing a lot of interest in these audience arcs. So it’s not just about like at the end result is, you know,

people’s better sense of agency and imagination. But these are the stories that are, know, because the Army Labs has like analyzed these thousands of arcs. Now we know what’s really working to draw audience and keep them engaged so that, you you get them into the theater or you get them to turn on their TV. What’s keeping them kind of coming back to it or, you know, writing a good review afterwards. So from a craft perspective, that’s one. The other one is, you know, especially in the entertainment industry, it’s going through a lot of changes. going through a lot of issues and really

the industry’s problems around corporate consolidation, freedom of speech, all of that, they’re actually democracy problems. So it’s really in the best interest of the industry to be ensuring that people are kind of having their back really at the end of the day.

Eric (28:14.456)
Good. All right. I’d like that answer. We’re sort of all invested in democracy, even if we’re just focused on the bottom line.

Brian Waniewski (28:24.457)
That was another kind of interesting finding for me from the report. Like I went into this research not necessarily thinking that all audiences would see value in like upholding a responsive representative government that protects the rights of the minority. And we found that they actually all do. They have different ideas about what that means in practice and what is or isn’t working and what we should do about it. But that kind of basic premise that…

democracy is worth saving is something that’s widely believed, which was nice.

Eric (28:57.07)
I would say that the research that we’ve done in South Central Pennsylvania for our History and Democracy project at the Alliance for Trust in Media bears that out as well. We were surprised to find that stories about the history of civil rights appeal across the political spectrum. And I thought that they would resonate more with one side of the political divide than the other. But really, think what our research suggested was that

All Americans are proud of the strides that were made in equality and justice during that period. If a journalist or social media influencer or democracy advocate would take one thing away from the research and applied it tomorrow, what would you want that to be? Melody, would you answer first?

Melody Mohebi (29:53.556)
Can I give two things? Thank you. The first is about meeting your audiences where they are and not really making assumptions about who they are. But I think going back to these four kind of quadrants, you can kind of step away again from that idea of these binaries and really understand what are their core values, what are they’re trying to seek and kind of reflecting back to them what are the things that are going to resonate.

Eric (29:54.914)
Yes, you can.

Melody Mohebi (30:20.851)
And you can still tell your stories, but just recognizing that people come at things from different kind of core values. So I think that’s one. The other, would say, this is less for the organizations that you, or the kind of types of entities that you were mentioning, but especially from the, whether they’re within social media or within entertainment, is about more stories about the future. We have so much about dystopia, but very little about what do we want this future to actually look like.

And so if we’re able to offer that a little bit more, think that will really increase that imagination.

Eric (30:52.174)
Great, thanks. Brian, how would you answer this?

Brian Waniewski (30:54.761)
plus one to everything Melody just said. I would say, you know, across all the research we do, all the different issues, we see a real problem with agency across most audiences, just a feeling of powerlessness, a feeling that, as we said before, the system is rigged and they really can’t, no one can do anything about it.

And so I think the more stories we can tell about people sort of exercising their power, you ordinary, everyday people up against whatever they’re up against and finding ways around it, through it, that leave them, you know, with a more, more in touch with, with what they can actually do as a human being. I think that would be a good thing.

Eric (31:39.672)
That is a very positive note on which to leave this episode. Melody and Brian, thank you so much for joining us on In Reality. Appreciate it and thank you for the work you’ve done.

Brian Waniewski (31:50.847)
Thanks, Eric.

Melody Mohebi (31:51.101)
Thank you for having us.

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Created & produced by: Podcast Partners / Published: Apr 16 2026

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