From "The Other" to "Another"
How One Story Can Defeat a Stereotype
Years ago, I found myself on a six-month journey from Cape Town to Cairo, armed with little more than a camera, recorder and curiosity. The project was called HUMANS, and the premise was simple: ask strangers the questions we secretly ask ourselves about life, loss, and love. On the shores of Lake Malawi, I met a guard named John.
If this were a typical news report, you would know him only as "the guard"—a stock character in a story about local primary school or poverty or a forgotten region in Malawi. He would be an archetype, a symbol. But John wasn't a symbol. He was a 91-year-old who walked as if he was 24. Who was sure he would turn 100 in a region, where most don’t make it past their fifties. The school, he was the guard at, had asked him to stop asking for night shifts, and instead had offered to pay him more for the day shifts. When we started our interview, he looked into the camera with a big smile. When I said, he could start talking, he laughed and said: “Let me enjoy this for a moment.” He wasn't just a guard; he was John.
That journey taught me one of the most powerful lessons in storytelling: the psychological force of pulling one person's story out from a monolithic group. It's a process called individuation, and it is our most effective weapon for dismantling stereotypes.
The Allure of the Archetype Trap
As storytellers, we often fall into what I call the "Archetype Trap." We use familiar roles—"the refugee," "the protestor," "the addict"—as narrative shortcuts. Archetypes are fundamental to how we make sense of the world, giving our lives unconscious context and meaning. They are the boxes we use to quickly organize a complex reality.
But this efficiency comes at a great cost. When we rely exclusively on archetypes, we flatten humanity. We turn vivid, complex people like John into one-dimensional representatives of a type: The Other. This cognitive shortcut makes it dangerously easy to stereotype, to dehumanize, and to forget that every group is just a collection of individuals, each the hero of their own sweeping epic.
Think about a current political debate and you will find personal stories being used to build connection and archetypes to create “The Other” - a monolithic group. I wrote more about the effects of using it to build In- and Out-Groups.
Individuation: The Empathy Circuit
But when a story refuses to let someone be just "the" anything, something magical happens. This is individuation: presenting a person in their full, contradictory, and specific humanity.
As author Jonathan Gottschall reminds us in his book, The Storytelling Animal, stories are empathy machines. 'Stories help us de-otherize one another. At their best,' he writes, 'stories show us that our differences are mirages.’ By showing us John’s dreams and quirks, we move beyond the archetype of "guard". We connect not with his category, but with his human desires and way of being. We see the world through his eyes. The "other" starts to feel a lot like "us."
We understand people when "we start to tap the larger context that defines them"—their beliefs, behaviors, and the environments they inhabit as Jack Hart writes in ‘Storycraft’.
The Psychological Power of the Unique Story
What makes individuation so powerful is the profound effect personal story has on human perception. As storytellers we tell stories to connect with other people and understand their world. Cognitive science suggests our brains are wired not just for storytelling, but for understanding story-worlds—each of us is "the hero" of our own complex narrative.
So when journalists present a member of a group as a unique protagonist—someone with a singularly ours story-world shaped by community, biases, and experience—something subtle but powerful happens: The archetype shatters. The group is no longer an undifferentiated mass but a mosaic of individuals. "A thousand people are a mob, but a single person standing up to that mob is a hero" as George Marshall writes in his book *‘Don’t even think about it’.*
Actionable Takeaway: Resist the Archetype Trap
How do you avoid reducing people to types?
Look for contradictions and context. Don’t stop at "the protestor." What does this protestor dream about? What’s in their pocket, or on their wall at home? What values and traumas shaped them?
Look for the specific in their story. What story can you only tell about them? What in their experience is unique?
Show identity claims. Let the details speak. Small elements—an old photograph, the music on a playlist—show who someone is.
Ask yourself: Who in this group complicates the narrative? Who doesn’t fit the archetype?
Look for the universal human experience. What helps us connect in the specifics of their story, that talks to the universal human experience.
Remember: Its much harder to define “The Other”, when you get to know them as people with dreams, ideas, quirks and unique and complex identities, that don’t fit in a simple, yet alluring box.
The next time you're covering "the other," find "another." Tell their story fully, and watch readers' understanding—and empathy—expand.