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Cover Image: August 2008 Scientific American Magazine See Inside

The Secrets of Storytelling: Why We Love a Good Yarn

Our love for telling tales reveals the workings of the mind

Other research by Green has found that people who perform better on tests of empathy, or the capacity to perceive another person’s emotions, become more easily transported regardless of the story. “There seems to be a reasonable amount of variation, all the way up to people who can get swept away by a Hallmark commercial,” Green says.

In Another’s Shoes
Empathy is part of the larger ability humans have to put themselves in another person’s shoes: we can attribute mental states—awareness, intent—to another entity. Theory of mind, as this trait is known, is crucial to social interaction and communal living—and to understanding stories.

Children develop theory of mind around age four or five. A 2007 study by psychologists Daniela O’Neill and Rebecca Shultis, both at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, found that five-year-olds could follow the thoughts of an imaginary character but that three-year-olds could not. The children saw model cows in both a barn and a field, and the researchers told them that a farmer sitting in the barn was thinking of milking the cow in the field. When then asked to point to the cow the farmer wanted to milk, three-year-olds pointed to the cow in the barn—they had a hard time following the character’s thoughts to the cow in the field. Five-year-olds, however, pointed to the cow in the field, demonstrating theory of mind.

Perhaps because theory of mind is so vital to social living, once we possess it we tend to imagine minds everywhere, making stories out of everything. A classic 1944 study by Fritz Heider and Mary-Ann Simmel, then at Smith College, elegantly demonstrated this tendency. The psychologists showed people an animation of a pair of triangles and a circle moving around a square and asked the participants what was happening. The subjects described the scene as if the shapes had intentions and motivations—for example, “The circle is chasing the triangles.” Many studies since then have confirmed the human predilection to make characters and narratives out of whatever we see in the world around us.

But what could be the evolutionary advantage of being so prone to fantasy? “One might have expected natural selection to have weeded out any inclination to engage in imaginary worlds rather than the real one,” writes Steven Pinker, a Harvard University evolutionary psychologist, in the April 2007 issue of Philosophy and Literature. Pinker goes on to argue against this claim, positing that stories are an important tool for learning and for developing relationships with others in one’s social group. And most scientists are starting to agree: stories have such a powerful and universal appeal that the neurological roots of both telling tales and enjoying them are probably tied to crucial parts of our social cognition.

As our ancestors evolved to live in groups, the hypothesis goes, they had to make sense of increasingly complex social relationships. Living in a community requires keeping tabs on who the group members are and what they are doing. What better way to spread such information than through storytelling?

Indeed, to this day people spend most of their conversations telling personal stories and gossiping. A 1997 study by anthropologist and evolutionary biologist Robin Dunbar, then at the University of Liverpool in England, found that social topics accounted for 65 percent of speaking time among people in public places, regardless of age or gender.
Anthropologists note that storytelling could have also persisted in human culture because it promotes social cohesion among groups and serves as a valuable method to pass on knowledge to future generations. But some psychologists are starting to believe that stories have an important effect on individuals as well—the imaginary world may serve as a proving ground for vital social skills.


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  1. 1. fire1fl 11:14 AM 7/31/08

    Although the article is strongly oriented to socialization and romance, it neglects the 'cautionary tale' as an important reason - both practical and Darwinian - for storytelling. Throughout a career in the fire service I was exposed to (and told a few of my own) stories about "how I survived to tell the tale". These were meant, and accepted as, lessons on how to be effective at the job while living long enough to be a silverback and tell one's own tales. Similar conversations broke out every year near the start of hunting season, to the extent that we jokingly talked about sweeping up all the deer droppings and tracks around the fire station before leaving. Old soldiers' tales and a myriad of other survival stories may be the important gain for stroytelling beyond socialization.

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  2. 2. Patrick Hogan in reply to fire1fl 03:53 PM 8/1/08

    You raise a very good point. Stories have many purposes and these recur cross-culturally at different levels of abstraction. My own work has focused on recurring narrative structures in the most enduring stories. These works commonly involve thematic concerns that bear on fairly broad issues of ethics or politics (e.g., the value of loyalty). However, the more directly prudential concerns of cautionary tales (relating to, say, hunting) may be more context-bound, more limited in their target audience, thus more ephemeral. As a result, they would be less likely to turn up in research on cross-cultural patterns. (They would be less likely to be written down, anthologized, translated, etc.) This results in a certain sort of bias in the data.
    Perhaps surprisingly, this issue of data bias bears on another issue in the article--literary Darwinism. My problem with certain aspects of the literary Darwinist approach is that writers in this school tend (in my view) to draw biological conclusions far too quickly from at best scanty evidence. Consider, for example, two very plausible preliminary hypotheses. First, stories commonly have political functions. Second, dominant groups have disproportionate control over the production and preservation of widely circulated stories. Given these hypotheses, one would expect, for instance, that the representation of men and women would develop in pretty much the ways literary Darwinists report. Thus the data alone do not decide between social constructionist and biological views of gender. Moreover, this does not even touch on the further data biases that enter when stories from one tradition (e.g., Igbo stories) are selected by researchers from another tradition (e.g., European anthropologists) and translated into English. One brief example--Paula Richman's work points to a range of non-canonical versions of the RAMAYANA, some of which are different from the standard Valmiki version in ways very relevant to gender study.
    These are all reasons why it is important to be bold in researching possible patterns across cultures, but also to be cautious in drawing conclusions about just what those patterns mean. For example, recurring patterns in heroic plots may tell us something about human biology. But they may also tell us something about more malleable aspects of group dynamics and the ideologies needed to maintain group stratification.

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  3. 3. jayemel1201 03:09 PM 8/2/08

    Hsu raises some good points, but some cautionary questions seem necessary. Do stories really "transcend" time and culture? I would argue they adapt to time and culture both in the way they are presented and in how they are interpreted. The medieval woman was indeed an object of beauty - blonde and blue-eyed. But she was largely silent! This is also reflected in medieval painting of women, who lack individuation. But in 1420 Robert Campin portrayed a woman, who is presented with remarkable personality (google her; she's amazing). At the same time, roughly, Pico della Mirandola was propounding the idea: "what a piece of work is man", which Shakespeare was to use in "Hamlet". The point is that the focus changed from God, doctrine, and the authority of the church, to man, and necessarily also to woman. Women had something to say, and said it. The percieved role of women, however, did not remain static. Retrograde puritanism weanted her to be sexless, obedient, and domestic, as in the novels of Richardson and often, alas, in Dickens, but Fielding and DH Lawrence made them more equal partners (google Hayez "The Kiss" for a visual). The story does not stay the same despite a superficial structural similarity, and especially the interpretation changes. This is not narrative transcending culture; it is adaption and evolution. And not always linearly. "Characteristic behaviour" tells us more about our cultural past than our evolutionary past. Tribal literature, and the "Iliad" is just that,
    tells us that bravery is essential for the survival of societies struggling for ownership of the best herds, crops, and lands. In industrial societies cooperative virtues, concerns for the well-being of others, are emphasised, because that is how business survives. Another question is whether the nature of experience in youth and age need be "actual" experience or something one acquires from both actual and fictional experience in order to promote empathy. Is the "family or friends" experience of homosexuality more powerful than fictional experience. At 76 I don't make too many distinctions of this sort. Of course there is an underlying biology at work, but pace Dawkins its only part of the complex story. I accept the Dawinian evolutionary theory, but am chary of accepting it as a deterministic doctrine to be persued with all the vigour of the Spanish Inquisition.

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  4. 4. emil47 10:23 AM 8/3/08

    The subject is really fascinating. But to say that "research on stories has only just begun" is a little misleading. I remember two science writers (Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen) who emphasize the idea of story-telling as a very important aspect of the human race; also, I think that the matter can be explicitly linked with Dawkins's idea about memes.

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  5. 5. peter T - Webshop 04:06 AM 8/10/08

    At a very basic level there are few opportunities for communication to take place between family members that can create the warm atmospheric loving and bonding experience a good story telling session can create. Some of my fondest memories are those when we used to sit around my grandmother while she told stories.

    http://webshopinabox.peter-tashjian.com/WebShopInABox.htm

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  6. 6. Carol Gray 11:16 AM 8/15/08

    I work in the field of autism spectrum disorders, and developed the now popular educational intervention, Social Stories, in 1991. A Social Story describes a situation, skill, or concept in terms of the relevant social cues, perspectives, and common responses in a specifically defined style and format. The goal of every Social Story is to share information using a format, voice and content that is descriptive, meaningful, and socially and emotionally safe for its audience. Every Social Story has an overall patient and reassuring quality. This wonderful article further confirms my theory that one of the reasons Social Stories "work" so well is because stories work for all people... While Social Stories are defined by ten characteristics that are consistent with the learning profile of people with autism spectrum disorders, I believe ultimately we will discover their success is rooted in human nature. Thank you for a great article. More information on Social Stories is available at www.thegraycenter.org. - Carol Gray, President, The Gray Center for Social Learning and Understanding

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  7. 7. adriaanb 04:15 PM 8/26/08

    I think storytelling is also important because in a stone-age setting it would expose us to the reactions of the group. And it is these reactions of anger and laughter that calibrate our moral sensitivities to those of the group. We mirror the emotions we feel around us. See my blog ADRIAANB at blogspot . com

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  8. 8. biestep 07:30 PM 9/2/08

    Let's not forget Joseph's Campbell's work on monomyth and his 1948 "Hero of a Thousand Faces." This article adds a fascinating layer to Campbell's examination of heroic archetypes across cultures.

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  9. 9. Jacob Freeze 11:58 AM 9/3/08

    Yow!

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  10. 10. Jim Lacey 09:36 AM 9/18/08

    This article seems to be unaware of the vast literature of folklore studies.

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  11. 11. educatorman2007 09:41 AM 9/18/08

    Perhaps this article exhibits itself as a poorly woven YARN strand knitting together a poorly made evolutionary fairy tale.

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  12. 12. mahwish 03:33 AM 9/20/08

    i want to register in this site. i also love story telling if the listener also listens interestingly

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  13. 13. VikingOmaha 07:13 PM 9/22/08

    As biestep notes, Joseph Campbell was here first. It is amazing that there is no reference to him in this article.

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  14. 14. VikingOmaha 07:15 PM 9/22/08

    As biestep notes, Joseph Campbell was here first. Why is no credit given to him in the article? There is very little here that I did not learn by reading Campbell.

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  15. 15. BasilBuddyBoy 10:04 AM 9/24/08

    Teaching ethics and philosophy in a very diverse student body, I find stories, theirs and those of world cultures, becomes a wonderful way for them not only to tell t heir stories but hear others, and sometimes see connections. Rather than always asking is the story true or not, I ask students to talk about what trusths the stories convey, and they often find common ground. J.M.

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  16. 16. Mark O. 10:18 AM 9/24/08

    While it may be true that "Psychologists and neuroscientists have recently become fascinated by the human predilection for storytelling," the study of narrative is certainly not new. The article is focused on perspectives of 'science,' and in doing so, largely ignores the contributions of scholars and researchers from other disciplines: Brunvand, Dundes, Levi-Strauss, Foley, Ong, Aarne, Lord, Propp, van Gennep, etc.

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  17. 17. D. Baxter 08:47 PM 9/24/08

    I find it curious that after many thousands of years of exhausting study of the spoken word that Jeremy Hsu believes psychology is just now discovering the magic of storytelling. The mythologist Joseph Campbell is mentioned in the replies, but he is essentially only the compiler of the thoughts of countless scholars and traditions. Linguists, folklorists, anthropologists, theologians, and all other disciplines concerned with words and their consequences (including magicians and alchemists) have flooded academic literature with tomes on the subject. Yet, nowhere in the article does Mr. Hsu mention Carl G. Jungs theory of archetypes, George Lakoffs and Mark Johnsons seminal work Metaphors We Live By, Bruno Bettelheims The Uses of Enchantment, or even The Brothers Grimm. I will grant that modern methods of studying the brain have much to contribute to our understanding of the phenomenon of storytelling, but to state that Psychologists and neuroscientists have recently become fascinated by the human predilection for storytelling, well&

    Danny R. Baxter

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  18. 18. lee du ploy 07:05 AM 11/3/09

    Donkey's like pajamas.
    ------------------------

    After the invasion( call it what you will) in Gaza,most of the animals in the zoo died through starvation,however a few donkey's survived inspite of all the sheling etc.

    Since there was nothing left in the zoo,the zoo keeper decided in order for the children to see a zebra,he would paint a donkey.................not only do I like the story but its a means to an end with purpose instead of a porpoise.

    lee du ploy (hong kong)


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  19. 19. lee du ploy 07:10 AM 11/3/09

    its only serves a porpoise if you're from New York.

    lee du ploy

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  20. 20. MIT_TEAM 10:30 PM 12/3/09

    MIT and the DARPA NETWORK CHALLENGE

    Hi!

    You might be interested in our scientific project for the DARPA
    Network Challenge https://networkchallenge.darpa.mil. We are a group
    of researchers from MIT interested
    in understanding how information flows in social networks.

    Find all the information about our approach at
    http://balloon.media.mit.edu and please write us at balloon@mit.edu if
    you want to chat with us and find out more details.

    Hope you find it interesting. Thank you!

    The MIT Red Balloon Challenge Team

    Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this
  21. 21. MIT_TEAM 10:30 PM 12/3/09

    MIT and the DARPA NETWORK CHALLENGE

    Hi!

    You might be interested in our scientific project for the DARPA
    Network Challenge https://networkchallenge.darpa.mil. We are a group
    of researchers from MIT interested
    in understanding how information flows in social networks.

    Find all the information about our approach at
    http://balloon.media.mit.edu and please write us at balloon@mit.edu if
    you want to chat with us and find out more details.

    Hope you find it interesting. Thank you!

    The MIT Red Balloon Challenge Team

    Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this
  22. 22. MIT_TEAM 10:30 PM 12/3/09

    MIT and the DARPA NETWORK CHALLENGE

    Hi!

    You might be interested in our scientific project for the DARPA
    Network Challenge https://networkchallenge.darpa.mil. We are a group
    of researchers from MIT interested
    in understanding how information flows in social networks.

    Find all the information about our approach at
    http://balloon.media.mit.edu and please write us at balloon@mit.edu if
    you want to chat with us and find out more details.

    Hope you find it interesting. Thank you!

    The MIT Red Balloon Challenge Team

    Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this
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