The cop, the kid and the six-foot elf

Die Hard’s John McClane walks onto a plane with a giant teddy bear and admits he’s afraid of flying. Buddy the Elf towers over the other elves in Santa’s workshop while failing to keep up in the toy production line. Surrounded by a full house of family chaos, Kevin McCallister loses his temper after his rude older brother Buzz eats his pizza in Home Alone.

This December, these classic Christmas films (we can argue about Die Hard later) may be appearing on a screen near you. These scenes may not be the first ones that come to mind from these movies, but they play a critical role in why people are still watching them three decades (or more) after they were made.

We may not know what it’s like to be a New York cop, but we understand John wanting to show up for children he loves. We don’t live in the North Pole like Buddy, and we probably don’t live in a mansion like Kevin, but we do know what it feels like to not fit in. By giving us a glimpse into the main characters’ ordinary worlds, we can see ourselves in them. And when we relate to heroes, we start rooting for them to succeed.

Using brain scans, a landmark study from Princeton discovered that when we watch, read or listen to stories – our brain patterns mirror what the main characters are experiencing. When we watch our favorite Christmas films, that means we feel scared, sad, excited or sentimental right alongside Kevin, John and Buddy.

A new study published earlier this year in Frontiers of Human Neuroscience takes it a step farther; fMRI scans showed that our brain activity significantly increases the more we empathise with a character. It suggested that the amount of empathy we feel helps us a determine if a character is a hero (a person like me) or a villain (a person not like me).

This is why when telling any kind of story – whether it’s for a Christmas film or a complex technical project – helping your audience see themselves in the hero will make it more successful.

Earlier this month, we hosted a story skills building workshop for a UK energy client. The team voted Die Hard, Home Alone and Elf as their Christmas favourites and they became our inspiration to explore how important it is to create heroes worth rooting for — not just in Hollywood but in organisational storytelling too. Our workshop participants were not professional scriptwriters. But while rapidly creating their own Christmas movie storyboards, it was not difficult for them to unearth problems we could all relate to.

And that’s what the best stories do. They show the experiences that connect us. In a world that feels increasingly fractured and confusing, there is something deeply comforting about the idea that most of us have something in common with a frightened eight-year-old boy, a naive six-foot elf, and a lonely cop taking on impossible odds.

As storytellers, helping people see themselves in others is one of the most powerful tools for change we have.