The Social Radars: Conversations with Startup Founders

Humans are natural storytellers. We're wired to encode our experiences as stories, share stories, and recall the stories we've been told. But most importantly, we're wired to learn from stories. We aren't born with a lot of useful instinct like many animals are, so crucially we use stories to pass on knowledge. Knowledge is useful if it helps us pass on our genes. And to pass on our genes we must both survive (i.e. not die) and thrive (i.e. find and reproduce with mates).

I'd guess the darker stories like the ones you're sharing are about survival. They pass on useful knowledge about what not to do if you want to live. We're instinctively attracted to these kinds of stories. For example, when someone dies, we all want to know the story behind how. Ancient humans who possessed a similar morbid curiosity probably out-survived their brethren. And we're their descendants.

On the flip side, success stories are about thriving. They're about accruing resources, status, respect, social capital. Sometimes they're about surviving too, e.g. climbing a tree to escape a lion, or finding the right kinds of food to forage for in a particular neck of the woods. The useful knowledge in these stories usually exists in the form of some special insight, or a set of behaviors or instructions. These are stories about things you should remember to do, rather than things you should avoid.

So it would make sense for aspiring entrepreneurs, public speakers, etc. to want to study success stories; and for pilots, race car drivers, etc. to want to study failure stories. I'd also wager that people who are aspiring to achieve something care more about success stories.