Wired for Story

The cinema audience sits almost immobile as they watch the movie. From time to time, someone makes a comment to a neighbour, or reaches into a popcorn bag, but, if the movie is any good, people are staring, entranced, barely aware of the passage of time. That’s the experience they’ve paid for. That’s the story trance.

Why the fascination? What good does it do us?

Historian Yuval Noah Harari has a fascinating take on this question. He wrote Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind ¹Yuval Noah Harari, A Brief History of Humankind (Signal Books, 2014), 20–39. It’s a book packed with remarkable ideas, but one of the most interesting is that our connection with stories is central to human evolution.

Our closest animal relative is the chimpanzee. Chimps live in fairly small groups, mostly extended family. Perhaps twenty or thirty individuals in total. They groom each other and recognize each other. As the group grows, it become unstable, and eventually a big group will divide into smaller groups, living apart. There will still be some back-and-forth between groups, but if chimpanzees ever come across a chimpanzee they don’t recognize, they’re likely to attack and kill the stranger.

Early humans probably behaved in the same way, living in extended families, with some interaction between nearby groups. However, as we developed the ability to speak, we found new ways to connect. I might not know you, and I might not recognize you, but if we speak the same language, you can explain who you are. If I discover that we are connected to the same people, I may consider you a friend, despite the fact that we’ve never met.

“So who are you exactly?”

“My name’s Zang. I’m the son of Losh and the brother of Vorn Crab-Hand.”

“Vorn Crab-Hand! I know him! He’s amazing! Come in. Sit down. Have a cup of ox-blood.”

This gossip-based connection allows much larger social groups. Some psychologists estimate we can keep track of about 150 people this way, so humans whose brains were good at gossip could form much larger stable groups than those who weren’t inclined that way.

Imagine one group of humans connected by gossip, and another group connected as an extended family. If these groups fight, it might be 150 individuals against 20. The smaller group will be massacred. So there’s a powerful evolutionary advantage to gossip. This kind of connection is still going strong, and it’s the basis for one of the internet’s biggest success stories, Facebook.

Gossip allows larger social groups, but its influence is still limited by our ability to remember names and faces. To create larger groups, we need a different social glue. Shared stories.

“Stop! Who travels in the valley of the Weasel Clan?”

“My name’s Zang, son of Losh, brother of Vorn Crab-Hand.”

“Never heard of you Zang. Nobody may hunt in our land. Prepare to die.”

“First, let me offer a prayer to the sun spirit, who led me here.”

“You know about the sun spirit? We love the sun spirit. He’s the best!”

“I know! You remember the story of how he defeated Ulk, the tree god?”

“Of course! Well, this changes everything. I can’t kill a guy who is a servant of the sun spirit. Come on inside, meet the wife and kids…”

This connection through shared stories allows humans to form into groups of almost unlimited size. People who share a belief in a certain story may feel a bond even though they’re not related by blood.

Probably, long ago, some people were more taken with stories than others. Some people are fascinated by the tales of the sun spirit – they can’t hear enough about his mischievous exploits. It’s early fandom. Other people just don’t think that way. They are less interested in stories and more interested in what’s actually in front of them – pragmatists to the core. What happens if these groups fight? The pragmatists gather in a group of 150 or so, held together by bonds of family and gossip. Then the enemy arrive, all sun spirit fans, and held together by their enthusiasm for the stories they share. A group like that can easily be thousands strong. They will wipe out the pragmatists. Evolution favours enthusiasm for stories.

As Harari says, stories are not limited to religious narratives. Today we share beliefs in many things that are basically stories – constructs of the imagination. He explains that the car maker Peugeot doesn’t depend on any physical fact for its existence. It has factories and workers, but even if an enemy could destroy its factories and kill its workers, the corporation would still exist, because its existence is a social and legal fact. Peugeot is a kind of story we all believe in. The same is true of most institutions, countries, even money. Their reality derives from the fact that we all believe in them. They are a shared story – usually with a clear narrative of purpose and progress.

People will live and die for these stories.

Our commitment to these stories, and our ability to be transfixed by stories, and our tendency to believe strongly in stories is what makes our societies cohesive and powerful.