How Stories Can Make Us Worse

Not all stories are empathy machines. Some are bias factories.

I’ve spent the last few emails/posts/essays exploring what stories can do for us. How reading fiction builds empathy. How the right novel, at the right time, can help us grow into someone more patient, more perceptive, and vitally, more ready to act when it counts. Stories can teach us how to see others, no doubt. What happens when they teach us to see them in the wrong light or in the wrong way?

Not all fiction strengthens our moral muscles. Some stories - probably more than we’d like to admit - teach us to feel for the wrong people. Or to feel nothing at all.

We don’t talk enough about the stories that go sideways. The ones that reinforce bias, or manipulate empathy, or quietly train us to accept cruelty, control, or conformity. Sometimes they’re well-intentioned. Sometimes they’re deliberately shaped to push an ideology. Either way, they work. That’s the problem. Storytelling works.

Fiction is powerful because it teaches us how to care. But that same power can be used to narrow or nullify our compassion just as easily as it can expand it.

There’s a long history of fiction reinforcing harmful stereotypes. We see it in Tintin where Indigenous peoples are reduced to savages or mystics. In Homeland where Muslim characters appear only as terrorists. In courtroom dramas where the Black character exists solely to suffer nobly or be rescued by the white protagonist. These aren’t solely relics. They’re templates that still echo through today’s bookshelves and screenplays.

Take American Dirt, a bestseller framed as a compassionate look at the migrant experience. Its publisher touted it as “the Grapes of Wrath for our time.” But many Latinx readers and writers pushed back. Hard. They pointed out that the novel reduces an entire region to cartel violence and suffering. It centres a protagonist carefully constructed to feel palatable to a white audience. The story might have been written with empathy in mind, but it ended up flattening the very people it aimed to make three dimensional.

When fiction simplifies the world to make readers comfortable, it trains us to be less curious, less critical, and less empathetic toward people whose lives don’t resemble our own.

Sometimes the problem isn’t who the story excludes. Sometimes it’s who it asks us to side with. When we read a novel, we’re invited to slip inside a character’s perspective and feel what they feel. That’s part of the magic. But it also means we’re vulnerable to manipulation.

In Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn hands us a lesson in narrative seduction. We start off trying to solve a crime, and end up rooting for a woman who frames her husband and destroys lives with cold precision. We admire her intelligence, her audacity, her meticulous control — so much so that we forget she’s committing acts of cruelty beyond redemption. By the end, we’re complicit. That’s not an accident. It’s the story training us to delight in manipulation, to applaud vengeance dressed up as empowerment.

Normal People by Sally Rooney feels softer at first. It’s a tender, bruising ballet between two young people who can’t quite get it right. But as we read (or watch), we find ourselves excusing patterns of emotional neglect and cruelty because they are framed as intimacy. We romanticise Marianne’s self-erasure and Connell’s avoidance. “It’s complicated love.” The story is so delicately drawn that we forget to question whether this hurt should be so beautifully celebrated. We don’t just sympathise with them - we begin to valorise their pain. But, it gave us the whole Daisy Edgar-Jones/Paul Mescal ubermeme relationship, so we forgive it a bit.

In Verity, Colleen Hoover sets a narrative trap that dares us to choose sides in a story that is designed to deceive. We’re pulled into a manuscript confessional from Verity, a woman whose words suggest monstrous acts. The deeper we read, the more we question our own reactions: is Verity a victim, a villain, or a viperous voice manipulating us from beyond the page? By the end, we realise our empathy has been weaponised against us. We finish the book wondering whose pain we should have believed and whose we ignored.

This is what

Will Storr

calls narrative alignment. It’s the way stories make us care, but also the way they trick us into caring for the wrong reasons. When a protagonist is charismatic or suffering or simply framed the right way, we’ll excuse almost anything. Walter White. Don Draper. Amy Dunne. We don’t just watch them. We find ourselves barracking for them. Even when they lie, manipulate, destroy. Actually, especially when they do. And bonus points if they’re wearing white underwear.

Stories don’t have to be neutral. But they should be honest. And too many reward cruelty with admiration, vengeance with validation, simplicity with comfort.

Sometimes that danger isn’t just accidental. It’s the whole point.

Propaganda is storytelling with an agenda. It doesn’t aim to reflect reality, it aims to create it. Not through facts, but through feeling. Through story.

We’ve seen this before. The Birth of a Nation made Klansmen into heroes. Nazi films (Jud Süß) dehumanised Jews through melodrama and fear. Cold War cartoons like Duck and Cover cast Soviet enemies as faceless shadows. The goal was never entertainment. These stories trained audiences not to care. And they were effective.

Propaganda hasn’t disappeared. It’s just morphed. The algorithmic storytelling of social media (the quick-cut video essay, the reaction clip, the bot armies and the paid agitators) isn’t explicitly framed as “story”, but it works the same way. Refugees are framed as invaders. Protesters become threats. Marginalised groups are edited into menaces through selective clips and scripted outrage. It may not look old-timey like Jud Süß or Duck and Cover, but the goal is the same. They direct empathy toward one group and drain it from another.

Even literature has called this out from inside the story. In what might be HIP’s first book club selection, A Gentleman in Moscow, Count Rostov watches old Hollywood films with a Soviet official named Osip. Osip grows increasingly frustrated - not with the quality of the films, but with their intent. He argues that during the Great Depression, Americans might have risen up against their failing government, but instead they went to the cinema. In the darkened halls they saw Cary Grant and imagined that their luck was just around the corner. They didn’t rebel because they’d been told, again and again, that success was just one lucky break away. To Osip, Hollywood didn’t just distract. It sedated. It offered just enough hope to prevent action and extended the Great Depression way further than in other non-sedated nations. The Soviet Union, for example.

This is what happens when empathy is weaponised. It doesn’t disappear, it just gets redirected. Once that happens, we’re not only failing to feel for the people who need or deserve it. We’re being trained to feel for the people who don’t.

This isn’t a call for censorship. It’s a call for awareness. If we want stories to build better people, we have to think about what kind of person those stories are helping us practise being.

That means reading differently. More slowly. More consciously. It means asking questions as we go. Who’s at the centre of this story? Who’s missing? What’s being normalised? Whose pain is being used for someone else’s growth?

If we don’t ask those questions, we risk letting stories make us spectators instead of citizens. Consumers instead of carers. Bystanders instead of heroes.

My blunt instrument analogy of the past month has been that fiction is a gym to practice empathy. It gives us rehearsal and training space for emotional navigation, ethical decision-making, and heroic imagination. It prepares us for the moments that count.

So yes, I maintain that stories can build empathy. They can also crumble it.

Choose wisely. And pay attention to what you’re being trained for.

~ Matt

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PS: A Story Worth Finishing

This series has been an argument in pieces - about what stories do to us, and what they can do for us. We’ve looked at how fiction builds empathy, how screen stories compare to books, how the right kinds of characters stretch us, and how, sometimes, stories go wrong. But the thread running through all of it is simple. Storytelling matters because it is how we see other people and our world. How we see other people shapes the kind of person we become.

Whether we’re nursing a novel, scrolling past a scene, or recalling a line that catches us just in time, the stories we carry influence what we do next. They don’t just live on the page. They live in the pause. In the noticing. In the choice to care.

If fiction is rehearsal for moral life, then reading isn’t a retreat. It’s training.

Choose wisely. Read like it matters. Read because it matters.