{"id":558,"date":"2009-10-30T10:41:24","date_gmt":"2009-10-30T14:41:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.megancrewe.com\/blog\/?p=558"},"modified":"2009-10-30T10:41:24","modified_gmt":"2009-10-30T14:41:24","slug":"story-psych-what-makes-a-good-story-part-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.megancrewe.com\/blog\/2009\/10\/30\/story-psych-what-makes-a-good-story-part-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Story Psych: What Makes a Good Story (Part 2)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Earlier I talked about how the psychological study of memory<\/a> can give us clues about what qualities cause a story to be considered \u201cgood.\u201d Today I\u2019d like to examine the role behavioral psychology might play.<\/p>\n

When people talk about behavioral psychology, the name that most often comes up is B.F. Skinner. Anyone who\u2019s taken an introductory psychology course will have heard of him: he\u2019s best known for his experiments with pigeons and rats in which he investigated how environmental stimuli affected their behavior. The principles he wrote about\u2014particularly, that giving a reward (reinforcement) increases a behavior, while introducing a punishment decreases it\u2014are widely used in many parts of our lives. Kids in school get stickers for good work and detention for bad behavior. An employee may get a raise for excellent performance and a reprimand for carelessness. Stop for a moment and think, and you can probably come up with a dozen ways you are reinforced (directly or subtly) for behaving \u201ccorrectly,\u201d and punished for a misstep.<\/p>\n

But what does all that have to do with stories? I\u2019d say rather a lot.<\/p>\n

Read on!<\/a><\/font><\/center><\/p>\n

As before, comments both there and here are welcomed. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Earlier I talked about how the psychological study of memory can give us clues about what qualities cause a story to be considered \u201cgood.\u201d Today I\u2019d like to examine the role behavioral psychology might play. When people talk about behavioral … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[11],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.megancrewe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/558"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.megancrewe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.megancrewe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.megancrewe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.megancrewe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=558"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.megancrewe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/558\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":561,"href":"http:\/\/www.megancrewe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/558\/revisions\/561"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.megancrewe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=558"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.megancrewe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=558"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.megancrewe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=558"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}