In 1944, two psychologists showed their students a simple film depicting a big triangle, a small triangle and a little ball bouncing around what looked like a schematic layout of a house. Overwhelmingly, Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel’s students felt the big triangle was bullying the other shapes, imagining their emotions and even constructing a plot around what was going on. Nobel laureate Robert Schiller has even written a book on how the stories we tell ourselves can shape economic ebbs and flows.
